[NYTr] The Other Story the (NY) Times Overlooked

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Ed Pearl - Dec 3, 2007

Black Commentator
http://www.blackcommentator.com/255/255_left_margin_story_times_overlooked.html

The Other Story the Times Overlooked

By Carl Bloice, BC Editorial Board

Weird people must be running the New York Times these
days. First, there was the baffling decision to ignore
the anti-war demonstration Oct. 27th, when thousands of
people across the nation took to the streets, demanding
an end to the carnage in Iraq. I wrote to the editors
asking why - and I know a lot of other people did, too-
but so far, no explanation. Then there is the decision
to place the Associated Press report on the large Nov.
16th anti-racism demonstration at the Justice Department
in Washington as two-inch briefing item way back in the
paper (page 15 of the national edition). I admit to
having been a bit surprised by the lack of coverage of
these two events but such treatment of social and
political activism is becoming almost par for the course
in much of the major media. It seems to me that a
portion of the journalistic elite think they,
themselves, are the prime movers in both domestic and
international affairs and that people marching in the
streets don't really matter much.

Two weeks ago, the Times, which says it carries "All the
New that is Fit to Print," got scooped by the Washington
Post. I say scooped because I would hate to think they
had the story and decided not to run with it. I refer to
the front page Post Nov. 13th report: "Middle-Class
Dreams Eludes African American Families. Many Blacks
Worse Off Than Their Parents." It, too, was carried by
AP as "Income Gap Among Black, White Families Up." It
was actually three reports from the Economic Mobility
Project, a collaboration of senior economists and
researchers from four national institutes who were
funded and managed by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Summing up the results of the studies: we're in trouble.

The picture, unveiled by the studies, was so startling
that the researchers are said to have gone over their
data repeatedly to make sure they had not made a
mistake. "There is a lot of downward mobility among
African Americans," said one of them. "We don't have an
explanation."

The gist of the story is that while most people are
earning more than their parents, the increase has been
much greater for white families than for African
Americans. The result is that in 1974, a black family
had an income that was 63 percent of a white family and
that had shrunk to 58 percent. Only about a third of
African American children grew up to have incomes higher
than their parents, while for white kids, it was two-
thirds. It turns out that almost 50 percent of African
Americans "born to middle-income parents in the late
1960s plunged into poverty or near-poverty as adults,"
in the words of the Post. The report on "Economic
Mobility of Black and White Families" observes that
"Achieving middle-income status does not appear to
protect black children from economic adversity the same
way it protects white children."

"Overall, family incomes have risen for both blacks and
whites over the past three decades," wrote Post staff
writer Michael A. Fletcher. "But in a society where the
privileges of class and income most often perpetuate
themselves from generation to generation, black
Americans have had more difficulty than whites in
transmitting those benefits to their children."

The studies and the reports on them use the term "middle
class" to describe the people being surveyed. That's in
vogue these days and perhaps we just have to get used to
it. But what they are dealing with are the lives and
welfare of members of the working class. The distinction
is not unimportant. Terminology can confuse things.
Thus, Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.
referred, misleadingly, in the Times last November 18,
to the possibility of "an irreversible, self-
perpetuating class divide within the African-American
community," between the "middle class" on one side and
the "poor" on the other. A lot of us will have trouble
figuring out into which of these two false categories we
fall.

It is important to keep in mind that most African
Americans are working people. They manufacture goods or
render services and that defines their relation to the
overall economy.

The Pew report reveals that 45 percent of African
American children whose parents took in about $55,600 a
year, grew up to be among the lowest fifth of the
nation's earners, with a median family income of
$23,100. That was true of only 16 percent of white kids.
"At the same time, 48 percent of black children whose
parents were in an economic bracket with a median family
income of $41,700 sank into the lowest income group,"
observed Fletcher.

The researchers told reporters that the importance of
the new statistics is that it adds a race and gender
factor to the overall picture of more general growing
economic inequality in the country.The reports found
that for many people, there has been a degree of upward
mobility from generation to generation. Most people -
even in lower income levels - now earn more than their
parents did and half of them moved up the economic
ladder That growth was most evident among lower-income
people. Overall, four out of five children born into
families at the bottom 20 percent of wage earners
surpassed their parents' income. Nine out of 10 white
people were better paid than their parents were,
compared with three out of four black people.

However, between 1974 and 2004, the median income for
all men in their 30s actually dropped 12 percent. But
because more women entered the workforce, and earned
much more than their mothers, median income for women
more than tripled during the period, to $20,000. "The
growth we've seen in family incomes is because of the
increase in women's income," Julia B. Isaacs, a
researcher at the Brookings Institution, who compiled
the reports, told the Post. "Without that, we would not
have seen an increase, because men's earnings have been
flat and even declined."

Black women earned a median income of $21,000 in 2004,
almost equal to that of white women. However, black men
ended up with a median income of $25,600, less than two-
thirds that of white men. Family income of blacks in
their 30s was $35,000, 58 percent that of comparable
whites."What startled the researchers, however, was that
so many blacks fell out of the middle class to the
bottom of the income distribution in one generation,"
wrote Fletcher.

Studies have also revealed a large wealth gap separating
black families and the larger population. For every $10
of wealth a white person has, African Americans have $1.

"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 some 2,300 families
for more than 30 years," AP noted. "One reason for the
growing disparity: Incomes among black men have actually
declined in the past three decades, when adjusted for
inflation. They were offset only by gains among black
women."

The median household income for blacks in San Francisco
is about $30,000; for whites, it's $63,000.

Why has all this happened? There has been some
speculation.

According to Fletcher, some "have speculated that the
increase in the number of single-parent black
households, continued educational gaps between blacks
and whites and even racial isolation that remains common
for many middle-income African Americans could be
factors."

Urban League head, Marc Morial, told him the root cause
was "disparities in inadequate schools in black
neighborhoods, workplace discrimination and too many
black families with only one parent." Fletcher quoted
another Harvard Professor, Orlando Patterson, saying
"These kids were middle class, but apparently their
parents did not have the cultural capital and
connections to pass along to them." Whatever that means.

The report does note, "Blacks also have lower incomes
than whites due to lower employment rates. The
percentage of men 16 and over who were employed in 2004
was 70.4 for white men and 59.3 percent or black men."
It might also have added that in some inner-city areas,
the unemployment rate for young black men approaches 50
percent. And academics wonder why the marriage rate is
down.

I don't know about "cultural capital and connections,"
but there is certainly one thing that African American
parents have had an increasingly difficult time passing
on to their kids: good jobs (and in many cases, any jobs
at all).

African American workers have been hit particularly hard
by something called deindustrialization. Because of
manufacturing job losses, the unemployment rate remains
high and can be expected to rise further if the economy
slows further - which is probable.

Following the great upsurge of our people in the 1960s
and the successful assaults on racial discrimination, in
a number of places where relatively well paid employment
provided the economic backbone of the black community,
those jobs began to disappear. It happened for two
reasons. First, there was dramatic technological change,
much of which has yet to rebound to the benefit of the
African American community. Then, there was the
relocation of industries away from urban centers where
unionization was strong, to lower wage, unorganized
parts of the country or abroad. In manufacturing centers
like Detroit, Pittsburgh and Youngstown, port cities
like San Francisco and New York, the amount of good
paying work continues to dwindle.

"The number of jobs and the types of jobs that have been
lost has severely diminished the standing of many blacks
in the middle class," union leader William Lucy,
president of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists,
observed a few years back.

Now, in another area of relatively prosperous employment
for African Americans, public employment, the other
instrument of globalization - privatization - is taking
its toll on our well-being.

Black Commentator Board member, labor activist Bill
Fletcher, has observed that, "privatization and
subcontracting, which many of us tended to think of as a
local problem, or perhaps a national phenomenon, is
quite international. Globally, privatization is not
limited to a department in a government agency. Entire
portions of economies which had previously operated
within the public sphere, and which had been subjected
to public accountability, are now being turned over to
private entrepreneurs, individuals and companies which
face little oversight. Efforts, such as privatization,
are being sold to us as a way of making work more
efficient and encouraging development. Yet little is
said about the loss of jobs and the impact that this has
on entire communities."

Deindustrialization, privatization and run-away
industries are part and parcel of globalization. All
three have hit hardest at those regions of the country
where black people are situated in large numbers. This
development has to be factored into any analysis of why
the economic situation for the majority of African
American working people is so precarious. It must be
addressed - along with the stubborn existence of racism
and discrimination in our society - if we are to do
anything meaningful to stop the alarming downward
spiral.

[BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Carl Bloice
is a writer in San Francisco, a member of the National
Coordinating Committee of the Committees of
Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly
worked for a healthcare union.]