The Challenges Affecting African Americans

For some time, I have been blogging about the status of African Americans. Quite obviously, it hasn’t improved; it may well be declining.

Now two community researchers—Shaylyn Romney Garrett and Robert Putnam—have demonstrated that we are at the worst point in half a century on four critical measures of racial equality: education, economic standing, housing, and health. (Omitted from this list are violence and residential segregation, which I document here.)

• “The life expectancy gap between Black and white Americans narrowed between about 1905 and 1947. But by 1995, the life expectancy ratio was the same as it had been in 1961.” There has been some narrowing in the last two decades, but this is due to the declining life expectancy of working-class whites. Due to conditions more prevalent in the Black community (obesity, diabetes, hypertension), as well as less access to health care, Black Americans currently die three times as often as white Americans from COVID.
• “The Black/white ratio of high school completion improved dramatically between the 1940s and the early 1970s, after which it slowed, never reaching parity. College completion followed the same trajectory until 1970, then sharply reversed.”
• Racial integration in schools “leveled off in the early 1970s, followed by a modest trend toward resegregation.”
• “Income by race converged at the greatest rate between 1940 and 1970. However, as of 2018, Black/white income disparities were almost exactly the same as they were in 1968, 50 years earlier... Black Americans, on the whole, have experienced flat or downward mobility in recent decades.”
• “The racial gap in homeownership steadily narrowed between 1900 and 1970, then stagnated, then reversed. The racial wealth gap is now growing as Black homeownership plummets.”

Garrett and Putnam trace these declines to the shift in the cultural Zeitgeist in the 1960s. Up to that point in the century, the movement had been towards a growing communal sense of shared cultural destiny in America. But the 1960s (so dear to older PT readers), despite greater talk of communalism, actually marked the emergence of the “me,” self-actualization era. This self-centeredness, sometimes called narcissism, has only grown in succeeding decades and generations.

For Garrett and Putnam, therefore, the blame for continuing and growing inequality is not the upper 1 percent (or even 0.1 percent). Rather, responsibility lays with the larger body of upper-middle-class whites who vouchsafe their own privileges and advantages for their offspring. This is a process Richard Reeves has documented in Dream Hoarders:

The book traces the way that the upper-middle class has pulled away from the middle class and the poor on five dimensions: income and wealth, educational attainment, family structure, geography, and health and longevity. The top 20 percent of earners might not have seen the kinds of income gains made by the top one percent and America’s billionaires. Still, their wage and investment increases have proven sizable. They dominate the country’s top colleges, sequester themselves in wealthy neighborhoods with excellent public schools and public services, and enjoy healthy bodies and long lives. “It would be an exaggeration to say that the upper-middle class is full of gluten-avoiding, normal-BMI joggers who are only marginally more likely to smoke a cigarette than to hit their children,” Reeves writes. “But it would be just that—an exaggeration, not a fiction.”

Although these data are self-evident and widely available (see comparable figures here, in USA Today), no leading politician of either party, Black or white, is willing to focus on and discuss them for fear of alienating the still-dominant white population.

Of course, Biden and the Democrats speak more about addressing inequality.

But even Democrats and Black leaders are unwilling to state: “Despite all our efforts over the last half-century: the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1968 Kerner Commission, the election of our first Black President in 2008, and now the election of our first Black woman as Vice President in 2020, we have been unable to put a dent in our deep-seated racial inequities.”

To do so would only highlight the Democratic Party’s impotence. Nothing in the present or prospective future, considering the past four years, indicates that the United States is better prepared to take on racial equality as a national mission.

We’re all too stuck on, if not our racial and social group’s pre-eminence, then our and our families’ survival.