George Carlin: "It's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."
Decades after the civil-rights movement, the income gap between black and white families has grown, says a new study that tracked the incomes of about 2,300 families for more than 30 years.
Incomes have increased among black and white families in the past three decades -- mainly because more women are in the work force. But the increase was greater among whites, according to the study being released today.
One reason for the growing disparity: Incomes among black men have declined 12 percent over the past three decades, when adjusted for inflation. They were offset only by gains among black women.
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"Overall, incomes are going up. But not all children are benefiting equally from the American dream," said Julia Isaacs, a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
http://www.star-telegram.com/business/story/301703.htmlThese figures come from studies of Black and white households done in the 60’s and 70s and then studies of their children’s families now that the kids are in their 30’s and have families of their own. Incomes for women, both Black and white, have risen, though white women continue to make slightly more than Black ($22,000 versus $21,000). The difference is much more profound when you compare the salaries of white and Black men. White men’s salaries have stagnated at around $40,000. Black men’s salaries have dropped from $29,000 to $25,600. Family incomes have risen overall only because more women work and women are making more money—though only a fraction of what white men make.
One particularly troubling finding---while children of poor African-American families typically grow up to have more money than their parents, those who come from middle class Black households only have a 1 in 3 chance of having higher family income than their parents. This is not true for white children, who are have a 68% chance of making more than their middle class parents.
http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2007/11_blackwhite_isaacs.aspx Startlingly, almost half (45 percent) of black children whose parents were solidly middle class end up falling to the bottom of the income distribution, compared to only 16 percent of white children. Achieving middle-income status does not appear to protect black children from future economic adversity the same way it protects white children.
This is not really news to anyone who keeps their eyes and ears open. However, it is important that studies like this are done and are reported in the mainstream media. Otherwise, the right wing will continue to insist that institutionalized racism and inequality are things of the past, and they will stand in the way of efforts to remedy this situation, which has profound effects upon our society.
Today, I am not writing about the origins of income disparity between Blacks and whites. Instead, I want to write about the problems it causes---problems which will never go away as long as the underlying disparate treatment is allowed to continue. In the chapter entitled “The Symptoms of Disintegration” in the book
Unhealthy Societies:The Affliction of Inequality, Richard Wilkinson writes about the relationship between income disparity—as opposed to absolute poverty—and makes the point that “wider income differences are socially divisive”. In Great Britain in the 1980s, under Thatcher,
“income differences widened more rapidly than they had ever been recorded to have done before, and more rapidly than they had in any other developed country….the widening of income differences during the later 1980s was accompanied by a slowing down in the rates of improvement in national mortality rates among age groups below 45 years old…and by a widening of differences of differences in death rates between richer and poorer areas of the country”
Although all causes of death rose with disparate wealth, studies of multiple countries revealed that the causes of death which rose most in the face of income disparity were those related to stress of the type that comes from feeling alienated or isolated from your society.
“The strongest relationships with income distribution were found with death from chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, traffic accidents, infections, and—particularly among young men—death from injuries other than traffic accidents.”
A study cited by Wilkinson of homicide rates in the U.S. by state reveals that those states with the highest degree of income disparity also tend to have the highest rates of murder. I found this statistic so interesting that I checked a few other statistics and found that those states with higher income disparity were also more likely to have eligible children not enrolled in Medicaid, were more likely to have lower numbers of eligible voters enrolled to vote and were more likely to have a state death penalty on the books. Clearly, these are dysfunctional states. Add to that more alcohol and drug use, more depression, more violence (including family violence) and you have a subset of American society that is living on the edge of disaster. Some victims of disparity see no need to keep themselves safe. Why should people bother to wear condoms to protect against AIDS when they live lives full of despair anyway? Why shouldn’t they despair when they are told from the moment that they are born “The American Dream is for some one else. You will make half as much as a white man---and be grateful for it.” People of privilege who live around them see the chronically stressed, sometimes depressed or enraged individuals as potential time bombs. Rather than looking backward in time for the source of present emotional turmoil, they look for the quick and easy fix---and nine out ten times that involves incarcerating some Black man.
The most troubling statistic which Wilkerson quotes is one about life expectancy in Bangladesh and Harlem. A boy raised in Harlem has less chance of living to 65 than a baby raised in Bangladesh. The boy in Harlem has a 30% chance of dying from complications of drugs, homicide or alcohol. The child in Bangladesh lives in an even deeper state of poverty than the child in Harlem, however, it is generalized poverty, without the stigma that comes from institutionalized disparity. The child in Bangladesh grows up without enough food or medical care, but he also grows up free from shame and repression.
Being forced to have little and to live in fear in a land of plenty because of something that you can not help like the shape of your nose or the texture of your hair, wears on the spirit. It is demoralizing. A society which condones it is guilty of the worst kind of abuse, like a parent who deliberately shuts out one child and favors another. And then comes the double insult. Society punishes African-Americans twice as hard as whites for showing the symptoms of the disease that is income disparity. Drug use by Blacks, acts of violence committed by Blacks are all more likely to net jail time and longer sentences. Societies’ victims are stigmatized as immoral, sinful, criminal. And then the geneticists appear to claim that African-Americans can not do any better, because they are not programmed to succeed. Or we are told that if Black children were only raised by white families, then they would do so much better in school—until they become teenagers, of course, at which point they would start hanging out with other Black kids, who would drag them back down, so what is the point, forgetting that if you parcel out children to families which have never been the victims of systematic racism, of course the little darlings will grow up stress free and full of self confidence—until they hit the real world.
The first step towards finding a solution is to make the public aware that there is a problem---and it has nothing to do with a difference in genes or morals or family structure. The difference is that our society still discriminates against African-Americans, particularly Black Men, whom the right wing teaches its base to fear as part of its political strategy to Divide and Conquer the working class. (See some of my old journal entries). The powers that be incarcerate, prosecute, persecute, stigmatize and do everything they can to keep the Black man down in this country. If anyone doubts that the United States still harbors a hard core “Fear the Black Man” core, ask yourself “How was Bill Frist’s Attorney able to convince so many people in Ohio that the NAACP gave out crack cocaine to get Blacks to vote in the 2004 election?” The nation witnessed lines of minority voters standing in the rain, and yet based upon the word of a white man, a bunch of people in Ohio dismissed what their eyes told them and embraced the oldest of American myths.
All this country's ills can be laid at the door of the Black folks http://www.grandtheftelectionohio.com/Flash/060326/060326.htmBy rights, the Brookings Institute study ought to be major news tonight. I wonder if it will even make it on television.
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