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PDFFrom The Nation:
According to the State of Working America, in the forty-year period that preceded the civil rights reforms of the mid-1960s, the bottom 90 percent of Americans shared 73 percent of the income growth in the United States. Black Americans, who were suffering severe legal discrimination and a marginal economic existence, shared in barely any of these gains. But for the generation that came after the reforms of the sixties—once blacks at least had legal protections—the economic situation was the reverse, with the top 10 percent of Americans getting 76 percent of the income growth.
In short, timing matters. It’s an unlucky accident for African-Americans that the range of government policies and programs that created the middle class largely excluded them. For instance, the GI Bill that provided returning World War II veterans with money for college, businesses and home mortgages didn’t work for the many black veterans who were discriminated against by colleges and banks. The rungs on the ladder that are supposed to lift people out of poverty were broken for blacks in the first half of the 1900s. Then, after the reforms of the 1960s, once the beneficiaries of economic development and anti-poverty efforts were known to be black, support—both in terms of public opinion and government funding—for those programs declined.
This economic history deserves much more focus during Black History Month, especially given how dire the present situation is for the black community: More than a quarter of blacks are living under the poverty line, and the bursting of the housing bubble has decimated what little wealth blacks had gained. Given the economic realities and the corrosive racism of today’s politics—as when Newt Gingrich referred to the first black president as the “food stamp president”—it’s not enough to just lift up a handful of black celebrities and movement heroes whose activism and radical imaginations have been watered down anyway. Instead, Black History Month should be a time when we recommit to advancing real solutions to black poverty and speaking truthfully about the economic history that led to the racial inequality we see today.
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