Racial Wealth Gap Widens

April 3, 2009 • Jessie Daniels • economic, racism

Recently in the Washington Post, Meizhu Lui, director of the Closing the Racial Wealth Gap Initiative, notes the widening racial wealth gap in the U.S. ( photo credit: Kevin Cortopassi ). Citing the Federal Reserve’s new report Survey of Consumer Finances, Lui writes:

The gap between the wealth of white Americans and African Americans has grown. According to the Fed, for every dollar of wealth held by the typical white family, the African American family has only one dime. In 2004, it had 12 cents.This is not just a gap. It’s a deepening canyon. The overhyped political term “post-racial society” becomes patently absurd when looking at these economic numbers.

In her thoughtful and well-researched piece, Lui mentions a couple of pieces of social science research about this racial wealth gap. Given that owning a house is the surest path to wealth for most Americans, she notes the racial disparity in the kinds of home loans whites and blacks have access to, citing a Harvard University study showed that in Massachusetts, a high-income African American was more likely than a low-income white borrower to get a subprime loan.

The other research Lui points to is one that highlights the structural advantages that whites have historically been given in housing: in Ira Katznelson’s “When Affirmative Action Was White.” In his research, Katznelson examines the white advantage built into the GI Bill after World War II in which white GIs received government-subsidized home mortgages, but soldiers of color were excluded. Of the 67,000 mortgages issued under the GI Bill in New York and northern New Jersey, 66,900 went to white veterans.

That’s how structural inequality in home ownership – and then, in turn wealth – gets put in place and reinforced. Through policies that systematically benefit whites and harm people of color excluded from those policies. Undoing those structural advantages is going to both a clear understanding of racial inequality and a concentrated effort to dismantle it.

Social Class, Race, and Intimate Partner Violence

March 14, 2009 • Claire Renzetti • African Americans, class, gendered racism, race, racism, sexism, women

Chris Brown’s February 8th assault of his girlfriend, Rihanna, has put the problem of intimate partner violence in the media spotlight (Chris Brown photo credit: O.M.Gee!). From Oprah Winfrey to Larry King to numerous entertainment and news websites, talk show hosts, commentators, bloggers and others have examined the incident from multiple angles, spinning off questions about abusive relationships more generally. One of the most frequently raised issues is the social class of the couple. As a writer for CNN recently noted:

Both singers are young, apple-cheeked, immensely talented and squeaky clean – the last couple you’d imagine as domestic violence headliners. Perhaps the only good that will come from the Rihanna/Brown publicity is destruction of our culture’s misconception that abusers and their victims can only be universally poor, uneducated and powerless.

Certainly this is an important lesson to be learned and one that domestic violence advocates have been emphasizing for more than 30 years: Intimate partner violence affects individuals in all social classes and racial/ethnic groups; no one is protected by virtue of their class or race privilege. That said, one of the most consistent findings from research is a strong inverse relationship between social class and intimate partner violence: As social class goes up, rates of intimate partner violence go down. Analyses of large, national surveys, for example, show that women living in households with the lowest annual incomes were five times more likely to have experienced intimate partner violence than women in households in the highest income category, and three times more likely than women in the middle income category (Rihanna photo credit: Trangdepp).

Poor women, of course, are not a homogeneous group. For instance, some poor women are homeless or living in temporary shelters, while others are housed. Some are employed, even if only in low-paying jobs without benefits, while others are unemployed or receive public assistance. Although poor women overall are at greater risk of intimate partner violence victimization, studies show that the poorest of the poor have the highest rates. Consider, for example, that nationally representative surveys of the general U.S. population estimate that about 25% of women are victimized by an intimate partner at some time during their lives. That is an unacceptably high number, but appears slight when comparing it to studies of women on welfare, which report a range of 28% to 63% lifetime victimization rates; the majority of estimates from these studies are 40% to 60% (Richard Tolman, “Guest Editor’s Introduction,” Violence Against Women, 5[1999]:355-369).

Research also indicates that poor women have higher lifetime rates of all forms of violent victimization. In a Massachusetts study, for instance, researchers found that among their sample of 216 housed, low-income, single mothers and 220 homeless single mothers in which the average age was 27, only 16% had not been physically or sexually abused in their relatively short lifetimes. Nearly 33% reported severe physical violence by a current or former boyfriend, 60% reported physical violence perpetrated by a male partner during adulthood, 63% reported severe physical violence by a parent or caregiver during childhood, and over 40% reported that they had been sexually molested during childhood. As the authors of this research point out, the majority of the women in this study had experienced only brief periods of safety during their lives (Angela Browne, Amy Salomon, & Shari S. Bassuk, “The Impact of Recent Partner Violence on Poor Women’s Capacity to Maintain Work,” Violence Against Women, 5[1999]:393-426).

One issue that has not been mentioned in the Rihanna/Brown case is the fact that the couple is black. Since the early 1980s, large national surveys have shown that black women are at greater risk of being violently victimized by their intimate partners than white women are. Some researchers have argued that the higher rate of intimate violence among black couples is the result of culturally specific factors that include beliefs about marriage and fidelity along with negative stereotypes of black women. But in studies that have examined both race and social class, differences in rates of intimate partner violence between black and white couples are significantly reduced or disappear completely when social class is controlled. The higher rate of intimate partner violence victimization – and, indeed, all types of violent victimization – among black women, then, is another outcome of racism: the result of the disproportionate number of black people who live in poverty. In her recent research on gendered violence in the lives of urban black girls, the vast majority of which is perpetrated by peers and acquaintances, criminologist Jody Miller informs readers:

This book should not be read as an indictment of young Black men and their treatment of their female peers. . . . [W]e, as a society, have created the circumstances that lead to cultural adaptations to situational contexts that shape urban African American young women’s risks. The indictment is of all of us. (Getting Played, New York: New York University Press, 2008, p. xvii)

Thus, while the attention given to intimate partner violence because of the Rihanna/Brown case is important and welcome, the emphasis being placed on the couple’s social status and how intimate partner violence happens even among wealthy couples should not allow us to overlook the fact that the greatest burden of this violence falls on poor women. And, as a direct result of racism, women of color are disproportionately poor and have the fewest resources available to them to cope with this problem.

Crisis of Capitalism, Opportunity for Racial Equality?

October 10, 2008 • Jessie Daniels • class, environmental justice

It seems that each day brings worse and worse news about the economy, but this crisis of capitalism may just be an opportunity we need for solving a number of ongoing social problems, including racial inequality (image source). In a recent post for the Huffington Post, former Senator Gary Hart suggests that the current financial disaster along with “a weakened Wall Street and a chastened conservative community” provides a unique opportunity for the next president to transform the U.S. economy and a “sober re-regulation of markets.” Hart is insightful here when he writes:

But recreation of another Rooseveltian period of 1932 to 1940, with a new set of rules for intricate financial institutions, is not enough. We must transform our economy from one of consumption to one of production, invest much more heavily in new technologies, research, and invention, and start the process of creating a post-carbon economy. The current wreckage must not simply be put back together to recreate the old economy. It must be pushed out of the way to make space for a new, 21st century economy.

The same may be said for foreign policy. Merely returning to the pre-Bush status quo will not work because the new century features a host of new realities: proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; the rise of stateless nations; the threat of pandemics; failed and failing states; mass south-north migrations; climate change; globalized economics; and the list continues. An Obama administration will have responsibility for repairing damaged traditional relations. But it will also have the opportunity to create a new round of international institution-building that includes international financial regulation and cooperation, international administration of a post-Kyoto treaty, reduction in nuclear weapons, integration of public health services, and so on. Our new foreign policy should be patterned on the immensely creative 1945 to 1948 Truman era.

And when troops and equipment are returned from Iraq and Afghanistan, our military should not merely be “re-set”, the Washington code word for rebuilding the Cold War military. Our defenses in the new century must acknowledge the transformation of war and the changing nature of conflict which will require new military structures, command and control systems, and even weapons themselves.

I heartily agree with this assessment and am disappointed that there’s not more of this kind of rhetoric coming from the Obama campaign (but, I get the political reality of just-getting-elected). I’d also suggest that Hart doesn’t go far enough. While the national and international leaders are trying to figure out how to clean up the detritus from the party of greed and excess that the capitalists threw for themselves, this is a moment of great possibility for thinking in new ways about old problems. Some months ago, I wrote here about racism, suburban sprawl and what it might be like to imagine a green future. The disaster in the financial markets is, in many ways, deeply tied to the idea of suburban sprawl and the “American lifestyle” which is doomed. And, now that ultimately unworkable style of living is, to hear some tell it, unraveling. I don’t disagree. And, added to that noxious mix of an economic boom squandered is one of the oldest problems in the U.S.: racial inequality interwoven with economic disparities. The combination of these two systems of oppression create all sorts of other havoc in people’s lives.

Yet, even as all the forecasts for the U.S. economy look dour, I’m feeling uncharacteristically… well, not officially optimistic…. but at least mildly hopeful. It seems to me that there’s kind of a perfect storm of bad, even cataclysmic, events happening at once that just make real change possible.

Perhaps, just perhaps, this is the moment where people get together and force their leaders to make real changes – as Hart suggests – in shifting away from a carbon-based economy to one that’s based on clean energy. Perhaps people will get together and force their leaders to invest in education, green jobs, and re-builing the infrastructure, rather than in foreign wars to support our dependence on oil. Perhaps, just perhaps, this is the moment that people can get together and demand more reform like the Green Jobs Act of 2007, which will make $120 million a year available across the country to begin training workers (and would-be workers) for jobs in the clean energy sector. Van Jones describes the benefits of this best when he writes:

At their best, green-collar jobs offer living wages and upward mobility — in growth industries. And most of these jobs simply cannot be outsourced to other countries. The reason is simple: the solar panels and wind farms must be constructed here in the United States, not overseas. And the millions and millions of buildings that need to be retrofitted to save more energy cannot be shipped over to China. They all must be weatherized where they stand — right here in the United States.

Therefore, green-collar jobs can provide secure employment for U.S. workers.

The key is to make sure that those people who most need the jobs — urban youth, returning veterans, struggling farmers, displaced workers from our manufacturing sectors — can get all the training they need to fill those posts.

The allocation for this ($120 million) now seems like a tiny amount now (compared to the $700 billion devoted to the economic bailout of Wall Street), but this kind of innovative thinking may just be one of the pathways out of the current mess. And, if we could ensure that these kinds of programs actually helped those most in need of jobs, it might go a long way to ameliorating economic and racial inequality. Unfortunately, neither of the presidential candidates is suggesting anything quite this innovative. The fact is the people will have to lead on this, and that is long overdue.