Probing the Black Elite’s Role for the 21st Century

”The black-white earnings gap narrowed considerably throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The earnings gap has [however] remained relatively stable since then, with inequality rising again in the 1980s and closing once more during tight labor markets in the 1990s. The average black family earned 55 cents for every dollar earned by the average white family in 1989; by 2000 it reached an all-time high of 64 cents on the dollar. For black men working full-time, the gains are more impressive, as their wages reached 67 percent of those of fully employed white men, up from 62 percent in 1989 and only 50 percent in 1960.” (p.7)

Furthermore, Thomas Shapiro’s research found that job-market advancement for middle-class and professional African-Americans has produced only marginal changes in the overall Black/White wealth gap. This is the gap in overall assets held by Black families and White families. At the dawn of the 21st century, Shapiro’s research found that:

Thus, it is clear that it has been the new “mobile-stratum” African-American households that have benefited most from the overall advances for Blacks in the post-Civil Rights Movement era. This means, in turn, that numerous problems continue to shackle the life conditions of “static-stratum” African-American families.

Problem-Spheres Facing Poor African-Americans

We can identify three main problem-spheres that make up the substance of the crisis-development fault line among 40% of African-American households today:

l) Family Structure/Poverty Problem-Sphere

Fundamental to the family structure/poverty problem-sphere faced by African-Americans in the “static-stratum” is the weak and sometimes non-existent job-market available to them. That’s been proved again and again – most recently in 1999-2000 when, as White unemployment fell to 4.2%, its lowest level in three decades, the Black unemployment rate sank to an historic low of 7%. It reached that level because poor Blacks, and especially poor Black males, had rushed to take the low-wage service sector jobs which, thanks to the powerful dynamic of job-creation during the Clinton Administrations of the 1990s, had opened up to them.

That was confirmed by a national study of more than 300 metropolitan areas by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Massachusetts-based think tank. It found that because the nation’s long period of prosperity had opened up jobs at the bottom of the occupational ladder, Black males age 16 to 24 with a high school education or less, were working in greater numbers and earning bigger paychecks than ever before.

We must note, however, that the tragedy for Black America’s “static-stratum” is that such “good times” – let’s call them – are an anomaly. But for the 1999-2000 period, the overall unemployment rate for African-Americans since the 1960s has continually fluctuated between 8% and 12% – twice the national rate. Moreover, Black youth faced unemployment levels at least twice as high. Today, the overall Black unemployment rate is back in double digits – hovering between 10% and 11%. These high levels of unemployment have inevitably led to sizable rates of poverty, and a grinding pressure on African-Americans at the bottom of the social ladder.

The Black poverty rate was nothing short of massive as the Civil Rights Movement reached its height in the late 1960s – nearly 42% in 1966, compared to a national rate of 14.7%. Such “Great Society” policies of the Johnson Administration as job-training and affirmative action slowly helped mitigate Black poverty in the succeeding decade until the rate leveled off at 32% for much of the 1980s. The long period of a booming economy during the 1990s brought it down even further, and today the poverty rate stands at 24.4% of African-American households, compared to 29% Latino-American households and a national rate of 12.5%.

A U.S. Census Bureau occupation survey in 2002 reported that low-paying jobs at the bottom of the American occupational ladder (with the exception of “farming, forestry, fishing”) accounted for 4,163,000 Black workers or 28.2% of all employed African-Americans. The overarching disability faced by such “static-stratum” African-Americans is that of weak family patterns. Professor Andrew Billingsley’s study for the National Urban League’s State of Black America 1990 provided data showing that working-class poor Black households had a 67% single-parent rate and underclass Black households had 75% single-parent rate. This fragile family pattern means, moreover, that over 60% of African-American children are being raised in economically distressed single-parent households.

These weak family patterns among the 40% “static-stratum” African-American households appear even worse when they are contrasted with family patterns among “mobile-stratum” African-Americans. For instance, in the upper-class category in Billingsley’s study for the National Urban League, the 624,000 African-American families he placed in this category (9% of all Black families) had 96% husband/wife pattern. And the 2,000,000 African-American families Billingsley placed in the middle-class category (27% of all black families) had 83% husband/wife pattern.

Thus, there is no doubt about the burden of the family structure/poverty problem-sphere for the 40% “static-stratum” among African-Americans. Should anyone have any doubt, just note that according to a study released in June 2004 by Family USA, some 40% of African-Americans are without health insurance (60% for Latino-Americans) and most of these African-Americans inhabit the “static-stratum.” This predicament, by the way, exacerbates the dreadful health and medical circumstances the poorest African-Americans endure, such as the fact that African-American babies are likely to die at three-times the rate of White babies, and African-American and Latino children under five are hospitalized for asthma at more than three times the rate for White children under five.

A graphic view of the social deficiencies faced by poverty-level African American families was presented by the African-American columnist Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post (March 4, 2005), where he critiques the cynical use by President George W. Bush of death rates among Black males to defend the Republican party’s reactionary attack on Social Security. As Eugene Robinson observed: