Weird people must be running the New York Times these days. First, there was the baffling decision to ignore the anti-war demonstration Oct. 27^th, 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 18th, 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. Click here to contact Mr. Bloice.

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