Wealth of a White Nation: Blacks Sink Deeper in Hole

by Black Commentator

Forget the hoopla and ballyhoo celebrating Black faces
in high places. The median net worth of an African
American household is about $6,000, while white
households wield 14 times as much wealth: more than
$88,000. The disastrous details are contained in a
report on wealth disparities by the Pew Hispanic
Center, ’The Wealth of Hispanic Households: 1996 to
2002,’ but the worst news is for Blacks, one-third of
whom have no assets or a negative net worth.

The bottom fell out of Black wealth accumulation in the
deep recession of 2000 - 2001, a downturn that hurt all
ethnic groups, but from which whites and Hispanics
rapidly rebounded. Whites recouped their losses from
the recession and fattened their holdings by 17 percent
between 1996 and 2002. Hispanics boosted their meager
household wealth to about $7,900 during that period -
still only one eleventh of white households, but almost
fully recovering the 27 percent loss they suffered at
the turn of the 21st century. Blacks also lost 27
percent of their net worth in 2000 - 2001, but got back
only 5 percent in 2002. These African American losses
appear near-permanent, the result of the
deindustrialization of the United States - the
destruction of the Black blue-collar workforce.

Hispanics, clustered in the low wage service sector,
suffered less lasting effects. However, for African
Americans, the worst news just keeps on coming, the
legacy of slavery and Jim Crow discrimination. As
Roderick Harrison, a researcher at the Joint Center for
Political and Economic Studies, told the Associated
Press: "Wealth is a measure of cumulative advantage or
disadvantage. The fact that black and Hispanic wealth
is a fraction of white wealth also reflects a history
of discrimination."

It is a ’reflection’ in the American mirror that whites
don’t want to see, believing in the vast majority that
their privilege and wealth has been earned - and at no
one else’s expense. In truth, as Harvard social
demographer Dr. Michael A. Dawson puts it, ’The racial
structures in the United States continue to this day to
produce wealth disparities.’ Today, these structures
are working feverishly to dislodge Blacks from their
precarious perches in the middle class. Yet whites
remain implacably opposed to engaging in even a
discussion of reparations, while continuing to profit
from ’the inherited gift that keeps on giving’ (see ,
May 8, 2002). Surfing through the recession with
their assets largely intact, white America pretends
that some malady of ’culture’ - rather than the crimes
of a nation - is what holds African Americans back. And
some Black fools believe them.

Tomfoolery in high places

’There were several members of the Congressional Black
Caucus who took the position that the racial wealth
disparity was due to the misbehavior of Black folks,’
says Dr. William ’Sandy’ Darity, recalling events at
the 2003 Black Caucus Week, in Washington. Several
silly Black lawmakers theorized that wealth disparities
could be eliminated if only African Americans would
engage in less impulse buying and save more money, said
Darity, a Professor of Public Policy Studies, African
and African American Studies and Economics at Duke
University. He continued: ’In fact, if you control for
income, the Black savings rate is at least as high as
the white savings rate. There is some evidence to
suggest that it might be higher.’

By Darity’s calculations, African Americans would have
to go without food, shelter, clothing and all other
expenses en masse ’for well over a decade’ to save
enough to achieve wealth parity with whites. ’So I
would say, there is no way that you can catch up by
systemic and careful savings. If African Americans
saved all of their income - that is, if we didn’t eat,
pay any bills, but saved every cent of income - we
could not close the wealth gap,’ said the professor,
who also teaches economics at the University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill.

In economics, the past is present; it is the cushion on
which some folks arrive in this world. In the United
States, those white cushions were likely embroidered by
no- and low-wage Black folks whose descendants are
today being slammed to the pavement with no buffer of
any kind.

African American households earn less than 60 percent
of median white income. At the pace of catch-up since
1968, according to a report issued earlier this year by
United for a Fair Economy (UFE), ’it would take 581
years’ to achieve income parity with whites. But wages
are not wealth. For most Americans, home ownership is
the major asset. Seventy-five percent of whites own
their homes, while more than half of Blacks rent. At
the rate of ’progress’ recorded since 1970, UFE
estimates ’it would take 1,664 years to close the
ownership gap - 55 generations.’

The roots of this unbridgeable gap - unbridgeable, that
is, by the conventional mechanisms of capitalism - are
much nearer. Duke University’s Dr. Darity follows the
path the mule never took to examine the value of the 40
acres most ex-slaves never got. ’We were supposed to
get 40 million acres, we managed to accumulate 15
million by dint of our own efforts, and now we’re down
to about one million acres,’ said the professor. ’I
think people tend to deemphasize the importance of land
as wealth. The areas designated by Union General
William Sherman’s [1865] field order are now some of
the most valuable land in American.’ He is referring to
the coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia, now
home and playground of the rich.

Of the 15 million acres of land accumulated by Blacks
throughout the South in the aftermath of the Civil War,
most ’was fairly systematically taken away through
terror, taxes and fraud. There were instances of the
wholesale destruction of Black deeds by arson,’ said
Darity. The African American real estate patrimony was
all but wiped out through white private and public
lawlessness - crimes that led directly to today’s
racial wealth disparities.

Had the post-Civil War federal government honored and
expanded upon Gen. Sherman’s 1865 promise, or passed
Congressman Thaddeus Stevens’ 1867 Reparations Bill for
the African Slaves in the United States, which would
have allotted 40 acres ’to each [formerly enslaved]
male person who is the head of a family,’ African
Americans might actually have gotten an economic leg up
on the waves of European immigrants that poured into
the country during the latter decades of the 1800s.

Trillions lost

What would an 1865 plot of 40 acres be worth to Black
America today? According to economist Darity’s numbers,
about $1.6 million dollars to every African American -
not counting the mule. ’That should be the anchor for
reparations,’ he said.

And what of free and devalued Black labor? In a 2000
paper, Professor Joe R. Feagin, of the University of
Florida, at Gainesville, reviewed a number of labor
reparations calculations. He concluded:

’Clearly, the sum total of the worth of all the
black labor stolen by whites through the means of
slavery, segregation, and contemporary
discrimination is staggering - many trillions of
dollars. The worth of all that labor, taking into
account lost interest over time and putting it in
today’s dollars, is perhaps in the range of $5 to
$24 trillion.’

Feagin also tackled the land issue, to demonstrate that
historical federal largess to whites dwarfs current
Black reparations claims:

’Passed under the Abraham Lincoln administration,
the Homestead Act provided access to productive
land and wealth, mostly for white families, from
the 1860s to the 1930s. Some 246 million acres were
provided by the federal government, at minimal
cost, for some 1.5 homesteads. Research by Trina
Williams estimates that - depending on calculations
of multiple ownership, mortality, marriage, and
childbearing patterns - somewhere between 20 and 93
million Americans are now the beneficiaries of this
large wealth-generating program over several
generations. Williams (2000) suggests that the most
likely figure is in the middle range, perhaps 46
million, a figure equal to about one quarter of the
current population. Almost all of these
beneficiaries have been white, as only 4,000
African Americans made entries under the Homestead
Act.’

Thus, white folks, many of them immigrants, received
multiples of the acreage promised to Blacks - 246
million vs. 40 million - yet their descendants laugh
out loud when African Americans bring up ’40 acres and
a mule.’

Not one cash dollar

Reparations supporters may tally the bill by any number
of formulas, but white America isn’t hearing any of it.
Data from a study of racial divisions under the George
W. Bush administration, conducted over the past four
years by Harvard University Professors Michael C.
Dawson and Lawrence Bobo, reveal no support among
whites for cash payments to compensate Blacks for
slavery and Jim Crow. ’None, no support, not any,’
Dawson emphasized. ’It’s a different world, in terms of
how different groups see reality. There’s also a
different moral universe.’

Within that morally challenged universe, only 4 percent
of whites favored reparations for Black slavery in
surveys conducted in 2000 and 2003. Two-thirds of Black
respondents favored reparations for slavery.

This year, Dawson and Bobo, both professors of African
and African American Studies, sought to clarify Black
and white attitudes toward three reparations proposals:
cash payments to African Americans as individuals;
scholarship funds for disadvantaged African American
youth; or the establishment of a Community Trust, to be
used to rebuild Black schools and community
infrastructure and foster small business.

Whites unanimously rejected the idea of cash payments
to Blacks. When asked to assume that reparations were
necessary, and to choose some form of compensation,
whites favored a Community Trust over scholarships.
African Americans favor both cash payments and the
Community Trust idea, but are more likely to support
the Community Trust framework. All three proposals
enjoy some degree of support among African Americans.

A question from the Dawson-Bobo 2003 survey may provide
the best measure of general white moral obtuseness on
issues of race. When asked if reparations should be
paid to the survivors of the white destruction of the
Black communities of Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921) and
Rosewood, Florida (1923), 84 percent of Blacks said
’yes.’ Only 11 percent of whites agreed, an indication
that widespread white feelings of guilt over racial
oppression is a myth.

Professor Dawson noted that ’even when presented with a
demonstrable survivor of a contemporary event, whites
oppose any reparations to the Black victims.’

That’s because most whites consider themselves to be,
somehow, victims of African Americans, just as they
feel set upon and victimized for no good reason by dark
Islamic forces in the world, and for the same reasons
that they constructed a national mythology of
victimization at the hands of ’savage’ Indians. The
Dawson-Bobo statistics tell a tale of racism in the
raw.

So deep is the collective psychosis, that the current
and historical reality of enforced Black economic
instability, as detailed in the Pew wealth disparity
study, seems to affirm many whites in their delusions
of superiority. Against all facts and reason, white
America rejects redress of Black grievances, because it
refuses to recognize its own bloody legacy, as
described by University of Florida Professor Joe
Feagin:

’White privilege is ubiquitous and imbedded even
where most whites cannot see it; it is the
foundation of this society. It began in early white
gains from slavery and has persisted under legal
segregation and contemporary racism. Acceptance of
this system of white privileges and black
disadvantages as ’normal’ has conferred advantages
for whites now across some fifteen generations.’

There will be a reckoning.

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