Report on Black America is a Wake-Up Call

In news that got scant national coverage since everyone’s so obsessed about the latest clunkers to come out of Rudy Giuliani’s mouth, the National Urban League last week issued a report called “The State of Black America” that ought to serve as a wake-up call but probably won’t.

It says the country’s come a long way since the great civil rights movement of half a century ago – but we’ve still got a long way to go toward racial equality.

In a time of economic disparity like we’ve never seen before – the top 1 percent controlling huge amounts of wealth, the top 10 percent sharing huge amounts and the rest of us splitting up the leftovers – it shouldn’t surprise us that race is still a big part of the disparity.

But the numbers are pretty shocking.

According to the report, African-American income is about 60 percent of white Americans’ – and that gap, in turn, leads to black families having less access to quality education (private schools, college) and to quality health care.

This isn’t exactly a bulletin for anyone in Baltimore.

Three weeks ago, the Associated Black Charities of Maryland issued a study showing the median income of black working people is just over $38,000 a year – and it’s just under $77,000 a year for whites.

This comes at a time when unemployment across the country is below 4 percent for the first time in nearly two decades. The problem is, for people of all colors, at a time when we’ve got low unemployment, and a big cut in corporate taxes, very little improvement has gone to workers, who have seen their wages stagnate for years.

That’s a great frustration for a lot of people – as reflected in the Urban League study. The report points out that, for most of us, wealth accrues slowly, and we shouldn’t be distracted by those athletes and entertainers who hit it big.

Unlike some white families, who manage to put together nest eggs over time and pass the money down to their kids, the report says it’s rarely the case for African-American families. They’re just as devoted to their kids – but the money isn’t there, even so many years after we thought we’d begun to even things out in American race relations.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, is now in paperback.

 

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