According to a 2011 study by the Pew Research Center, the average white household’s wealth was 20 times that of the average black household.

How do such things happen? Jeannette Wicks-Lim, an assistant research professor at the Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, writing in the January-February 2012 issue of Dollars and Sense, said, “It’s important to remember wealth’s special role in supporting a household’s economic well-being. Even though income forms the stream of money that collects into a household’s pool of wealth, wealth and income are crucially different.”

As she points out, income pays for everyday living expenses, the groceries, clothes, and gas. A family’s wealth, or net worth, includes all the assets they’ve built up over time (e.g., savings account, retirement fund, home, car) minus any money they owe (e.g., school loans, credit-card debt, mortgage). “Access to such wealth determines whether a layoff or medical crisis creates a bump in the road, or pushes a household off a financial cliff,” wrote Wicks-Lin. “Wealth can also provide families with financial stepping-stones to advance up the economic ladder, such as money for college tuition, or a down payment on a house.”

There many reasons for this disparity in wealth, which is a part of the general disparity in wealth between the 1 percent at the top and the other 99 percent, but the black-white disparity is in a category of its own and needs to be examined, keeping several aspects of American history and life in mind. This disparity has its roots in slavery and its aftermath, a century of Jim Crow and, in recent decades right into this new century, what is called the New Jim Crow.

Another report quotes a Canadian psychological study that shows a link between lower intelligence and conservative political views. Is it possible that the one could have an effect on the other? Some might say that the latter study, from the Canadian journal Psychological Science, is a no-brainer, but it’s worth examining a little more closely, because it doesn’t say that conservatives are less intelligent. Rather, it says that “conservatism thrives on low intelligence and poor information.”

Writing in the Feb. 12 issue of the British newspaper, The Guardian, George Monbiot wrote of the Canadian study, “It is by no means the first such paper. There is plenty of research showing that low general intelligence in childhood predicts greater prejudice towards people of different ethnicity or sexuality in adulthood. Open-mindedness, flexibility, trust in other people: all these require certain cognitive abilities. Understanding and accepting others – particularly ‘different’ others – requires an enhanced capacity for abstract thinking.”

In the current state of the U.S. economy, a primary problem for black Americans is an economic one, which is exacerbated by other issues, such as difficulty in participating in the nation’s politics, which is commonly seen in a democratic society as a way to provide equality and equitability in both the political and economic system.

Upward mobility for most of us has been through both education and the organized labor movement. For those who have been fortunate enough to be able to afford education, there has been movement into the middle class. For the working class, however, unions have been the traditional way to a decent standard of living and the means to provide future generations with a good education. Something bad has happened along the way to a better life. It’s almost a cliché that today’s younger generation will not do as well as their parents’ generation and that has come about through constant downward pressure on wages, income, and accumulation of wealth, at every level.

In addition, there have been increases in tuition and other costs of higher education, as well as the financial starving of public schools in the places where good schools are needed most, in the city ghettoes and in the rural enclaves, in both of which there is less and less economic activity to pay for good schools and other services of a good society. As well, the relentless assault on American workers and their standard of living has resulted in an ever-dwindling union movement, unions being the engine of working class success, from one generation to another. The rights of workers to form unions and improve the lives of millions of families have been thwarted.

For black Americans, the public sector has been one of the most dependable sources of well-paying jobs, especially where public workers have the right to form unions. In the hostile climate of 2012, the country’s right wing politicians, from Governor Scott Walker, R-Wisconsin, to Governor Mitch Daniels, R-Indiana, other governors, and big business organizations, have zeroed in on public workers and their unions. They have targeted for elimination the very source of jobs for black workers and for their unions, which have brought their pay and living standard up to match many in the middle class. This is a fight that has just begun.

Where does support for the right wing agenda come from? Basically, it’s from Corporate America and a sizable proportion of wage working men and women who should be able to see what side of their bread is buttered. It was this element in the country that supported the Tea Party movement and was, essentially, a rightist populist movement. It was easy to manipulate them into attacking Barack Obama as an alien, someone not born in this country, not a Christian as he had said, and, even, possibly a Muslim! It rather supports the Canadian study about low intelligence and bad information making for a mass of people who take conservative positions and have a biased view of the “other.”

Voter suppression is once again in the news, even though it was evident in Florida (the key state) in the 2000 presidential election, in Ohio (the key state in the 2004 presidential election), and is a big issue in the presidential contest this year. Some states, under the wildly erroneous claim that there is massive voter fraud, are calling for photo identification and other ploys to keep as many away from the polls as possible. The right wing business groups (most of them), right wing politicians, Republicans, and others have made the claims, but there is little evidence of voter fraud, and still they push for what can be seen as the equivalent of a modern day poll tax. They know that most black voters and other minority voters, as well as low-income voters, in general, vote Democratic.

Even though the Democrats have not done much to overcome the onslaught of money that has been dumped into the political system and have been reluctant to stand up against Corporate America and for policies that lift up the working class and sustain the middle class, people still have more confidence and hope in the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, than in the party of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. There really isn’t any other party that attracts the average citizen, so the GOP is busy trying to suppress the minority vote and the votes of low-income citizens (in places where they are likely to vote) for Democrats.

It is true that there have been other movements that have sought to shine the spotlight on the vast disparity in wealth between the richest 1 percent and the rest of us, the most recent being the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. Because they were making inroads into the hearts and minds of millions of Americans, their encampments had to be removed or destroyed and, with no small amount of violence, the removals had to serve as a warning to anyone else who might criticize the takeover of our national life by faceless, nameless corporate interests. The encampments may not be there, but the Occupy young people have continued their work and they are making common cause with other organizations that seek peace and social and economic justice, especially including unions.

Right wing populists who want to “take back America” from the likes of Obama are doing the bidding of their mentors (or masters) in Corporate America and the people who are on the right fringes of American politics. The pity is that they cannot see that what they are professing is directly against their own interests and that of their families. They see anyone who is not like them as the “other” or the alien, both of whom are “the enemy.” These people are easily molded, because they have been victims of an educational system that is the captive of commercial interests and which serves those interests. They have been duped and they enjoy playing the role they’ve been given, largely because they’ve been made to feel important.

For most of these unfortunates, they cannot see that their financial and economic difficulties are part of the same plan as that which puts white wealth at 20 times that of black wealth in 2012 America. This has been an all-out assault on the living standards of every person in America. There’s a small army of politicians that will do what is necessary to ensure that the 1 percent keeps both its income and its wealth, while the other 99 percent pays in so many ways, including dying in the wars not of their making. The cost of our endless war-making is borne by the 99 percent, in blood and treasure. To pay for war, every social and public program will be reduced or eliminated to pay for tax breaks for the rich and for the wars and weapons systems that are breaking us.

When he was assassinated in Memphis in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was in the process of transforming a highly successful civil rights movement (that had spread across the entire country in less than a decade) into a poor people’s movement. The reality of that possibility must have washed over the powers that be like a tsunami.

What if such a movement was as successful as that which resulted in passage of civil rights laws and a voting rights act? That broke down racial barriers and made other profound changes in society? It was, indeed, a possibility. If it had been successful, we would have seen the debate about the disparity between rich and poor four decades ago. Now, we can only speculate about it, for it did not happen.

We are in a different time and 40-plus years have given the 1 percent adequate time to consolidate their wealth and their political power, which their wealth has given them. We are in a time of so-called instant communications, a time when the government (more likely though, corporate interests) can keep tabs on every one of us and keep files on people who might threaten their hegemony over not only individual citizens, but over the entire country. And, it is a time when our own Supreme Court has ruled that money is speech and corporations are human beings.

In this time, the real human beings need to stand up and be counted. What we need to know to accomplish the goals of the founders, as indicated in the Declaration of Independence and in the U.S. Constitution (with the warts and flaws included), is there for us to see and learn. It will take leadership, inspiration, work, study, and solidarity to accomplish what needs to be done. Rulers anywhere can have only a limited time to exercise absolute control over a people.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union organizer. His union work started when he became a local president of The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years for newspapers in New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.