The Race Gap in the Economic Recovery
Earlier this month, the Federal Reserve released an immense report detailing evidence of the nation’s ongoing economic recovery. The collective net worth of American households and non-profits rose $6.3 trillion since the first quarter of 2009 (generally considered the low point of the Great Recession). And the value of household real-estate grew by well over $800 billion. But we are still billions of dollars down from where we were when the economy collapsed in late 2007. And for many Americans, the recovery has not yet begun—least of all for poor communities of color.
No one would be surprised to hear that blacks and Latinos are worse off than non-Hispanic whites. But the gap is growing apace. Thomas Shapiro, director of the director of the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University, finds that worrisome.
Earlier this year, Shapiro and his Institute colleagues released a study showing the wealth gap had more than quadrupled in one generation. The gap between the accumulated wealth of white and black Americans (excluding home equity) stood at $20,000 in 1984; by 2007 it had grown to $95,000. “The growth of the racial wealth gap significantly affects the economic future of American families. For example, the racial wealth gap in 1984 amounted to less than three years tuition payment for one child at a public university. By 2007, the dollar amount of the gap is enough to pay full tuition at a four year public university for two children, plus tuition at a public medical school,” the researchers wrote.
Even high income African Americans were doing poorly relative to whites: “Middle income white households had greater gains in financial assets than high income African Americans. By 2007, they had accumulated $74,000 whereas the average high income African American family owned only $18,000.” The study analyzed data compiled before the economic crash. But since then, believes Shapiro, things have gotten worse. From 2007 to the end of the first quarter of 2009, low-income black families (those with an annual income of $40,000 or less) found their “asset securities… reduced from about a thousand dollars to about 200 bucks,” he said, during an interview. In other words, if they suddenly lost their income and had to rely on savings, their financial reserves would run out in less than a week.
The situation for elderly persons of color is particularly dire. Over 90% of Latino and black seniors lack “sufficient economic security to sustain themselves through their projected lives. Among Latino single seniors, only four percent are financially secure,” concluded a study jointly conducted by the Institute and Demos, a New York-based research and advocacy organization.
For Shapiro, such findings raise the question of whether America’s racial progress will collapse under the weight of financial insecurity. It also makes him question whether public policy has been effectively employed. In the aftermath of Katrina, he argues, there was an opportunity to undo the effect of generations of extreme residential segregation. That opportunity, he says, was lost, as New Orleans recreated the segregation the hurricane had destroyed. Now, he believes, we have another opportunity: to use tax and fiscal policy to create a more egalitarian society.
The wrinkle, I point out, during our conversation, is that many Americans don’t see economic egalitarianism as a particular priority—or even as a desirable goal. At a time when so many are struggling, the idea of targeting minorities for special help seems a difficult notion to sell. Indeed, if the goings on in Arizona are any indication, many Americans are fed up with minorities period. In that great state, one legislator is so worried about the Latino invasion that he is prepared to reject the Constitution in order to deny citizenship to children born to undocumented immigrants, Other outspoken citizens are angry that a school mural depicts (too prominently , they say) a boy with a dark complexion.
Shapiro concedes the point, but makes another—which is that the issue, at base, is less about race than about what makes economic sense. The racial dimension simply illuminates policies that don’t work well for most Americans. By his estimate, at least $369 billion of public money annually is invested in individual and family wealth-building: “mostly through subsidies for homeowners, subsidies for retirement, and subsidies for health care.” Those resources, he argues, are not well spent. “Whether intended or not, the consequences are highly targeted, such that the top 1 percent receives 45 percent of the benefits. The bottom 60 percent receive three percent. Let’s ask if we can have a more effective return on that investment.”
His is clearly the right question. What is unclear is whether we will ever have the appetite to act on the answer
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Ellis Cose, author, columnist and contributing editor (since 1993) for Newsweek magazine and former chairman of the editorial board and editorial page editor of the New York Daily News, began his journalism career as a weekly columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times—becoming, at the age of 19, the youngest editorial page columnist ever employed by a major Chicago daily. Cose, who is also an independent radio producer, is a popular campus lecturer and public speaker.
In addition to serving as a columnist, editor and national correspondent for the Chicago Sun-Times, Cose has been a contributor and press critic for Time magazine, president and chief executive officer of the Institute for Journalism Education, chief writer on management and workplace issues for USA Today (where he has also served as an occasional columnist and member of the board of contributors) and a member of the editorial board of the Detroit Free Press. He has also been a fellow at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University, at the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences, a senior fellow and director of energy policy studies at the Washington-based Joint Center for Political Studies, and a consultant to the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.
Cose's Bone to Pick: On Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Reparation and Revenge, was published by Atria (a Simon and Schuster imprint) in April 2004. The book is a wide-ranging look at a number of societies—the United States, Ghana, South Africa, East Timor, and Peru among them—and their ways of coping with cruelty and pain. The Washington Post had this to say: "The complex questions surrounding 'forgiveness, reconciliation, reparation, and revenge' probably require a scholarship of jurisprudence, philosophy, psychology, history and literature. This is the kind of ambitious enterprise that the world's great religions deal with. But Cose meets the challenge, and Bone to Pick ranges over centuries of contested histories, across five continents, spinning individual tragedies in and out of collective traumas, seeking the nature of 'forgiveness, albeit as a proxy for a larger set of values.' … The truth may be a prized (and politicized) commodity in the quest for social justice, but as Cose observes, quoting Czech novelist Milan Kundera, 'The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.' Bone to Pick is a timely reminder of that axiom and a useful addition to the canon of that struggle."
Cose's The Envy of the World, an in-depth essay on the state of black men in America, was published by Washington Square Press (an imprint of Simon and Schuster) in 2002 and has appeared on several best-seller lists, including the Essence magazine list, where it was number one. Newsweek featured the book on its cover and National Public Radio produced a special a program based on it. Kirkus Reviews called The Envy of the World, "A slender volume with a substantial and significant message." The Washington Post described it as "lucid, eloquent and deeply personal book." The Chicago Tribune called its author "a gifted, rhapsodic essayist." "Cose charts both an urgently argued history of black masculinity and a moving and nuanced snapshot of where it is now," declared Publishers' Weekly. The paperback edition was published in January 2003.
In May 2004 the Rockefeller Foundation issued Beyond Brown v. Board: The Final Battle for Excellence in American Education—a major report authored by Cose on the legacy of the historic Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision and the current challenges facing American educators. The report was the basis of a Newsweek cover feature and for a David Broder column and other stories in the national press. In November 2006, the Institute for Justice and Journalism at USC's Annenberg School published Cose's Killing Affirmative Action: Would ending it really result in a better, more perfect Union? That report, featured in several newspaper and in Newsweek magazine, examined California's 10-year experience living with Proposition 209, the measure that ended affirmative action in the public sector in California.
Cose's best-selling The Rage of a Privileged Class, a book-length essay on race in America, was published by HarperCollins in January 1994. It was featured as a Newsweek cover story and described by The New York Times Book Review as a "disciplined, graceful exposition of a neglected aspect of the subject of race in America." His A Man's World (published by HarperCollins in June 1995), was featured in a front page review in The New York Times Book Review. The Washington Post called it "a valuable, cogent and well-written contribution to an enormously complex subject."
Color-Blind: Seeing Beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World (published in January 1997 and also excerpted in Newsweek) explored America's continuing obsession with race. The New York Times Book Review called it "a book this country desperately needs, one with genuine healing potential," and included Color-Blind among its best book of the year recommendations for 1997. Cose edited an essay collection entitled The Darden Dilemma published by HarperCollins in March 1997. His debut novel, The Best Defense, was published by HarperCollins in September 1998 ("a formidable first novel...crisp, fast-paced and engaging. In a genre glutted with lightweight fare, The Best Defense reaches higher"— The Seattle Times).
Cose is also the author of A Nation of Strangers, a history of American immigration, published by William Morrow and Co. in 1992 and of The Press, published by Morrow in 1989. He is the author of Energy and the Urban Crisis (1979) and the editor of Energy and Equity: Some Social Concerns (1978), both published by the Joint Center for Political Studies. He also wrote The Rebirth of Community Power, published by Westview Press: 1983.
At the Institute for Journalism Education (at the University of California, Berkeley), Cose designed and directed a widely quoted study on journalism careers published by IJE: The Quiet Crisis: Minority Journalists and Newsroom Opportunity (1985). He also instituted and served as inaugural director of IJE's Management Training Center at Northwestern University.
In his capacity as president of Ellis Cose, Inc. Cose has produced, written and hosted the pilot for a multimedia documentary series: "Against the Odds." The radio project (which has received funding from the Ford Foundation and will be distributed by Public Radio International) profiles individuals who have overcome tremendous adversity. It aspires to provide continuing and better coverage—in public radio but also on the web and in other media, including print—of people and communities often relegated to the margins of society. It also aims to stimulate thinking on how they, and their respective societies, can overcome that marginalization. The pilot focuses on a young man from a refugee camp in northern Kenya who, studying by the light of a rechargeable lamp, managed to get himself into Princeton University.
Cose has appeared on The Today Show, Nightline, Dateline, ABC Evening News, Good Morning America, the PBS "Time to Choose" election special, Charlie Rose, CNN's Talk Back Live, and a variety of other nationally televised and local programs. He has been interviewed for British, Brazilian and Canadian television. He is also a judge for the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. Cose has received fellowships or individual grants from the Ford Foundation, The Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, and numerous journalism awards—including the University of Missouri medal for career excellence and distinguished service in journalism, two Clarion awards, and four National Association of Black Journalists first place awards. He was also named the 2002 winner of the New York Association of Black Journalists' lifetime achievement award, winner of the 2003 award for best magazine feature from the National Association of Black Journalists as well as the winner of two New York Association of Black Journalists' first place 2003 awards for commentary and magazine features. In 2004 Cose was named the first recipient of the newly inaugurated annual Vision Award from the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. In 2006 he won a Unity award for commentary and also shared in a first place award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
A Chicago native, Cose holds a master's degree in Science, Technology and Public Policy from George Washington University. He is married to Lee Llambelis, former legal director for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund and current director of intergovernmental relations for the Attorney General of New York. He has a daughter, Elisa Maria.
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