The Black Report with Boris.
Black News UK takes a deep dive into racial disparities both in the U.K and U.S with as he prefers to be known as, the publicly voted and deposed leader of the UK goverment.
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Black News recognises the treatment and conditioning of black people to accept it has never not been more evident.
And this comes with a realisation that we are yet under further attacks not just from Police Killings but the denial by our own goverments of institutionalised racism within our countries.
Black News points out that an old white retired judge in the U.K was believed by all when he defined it, { McPherson Report} but many disparitiy reports recently suggest otherwise? This kind of backward thinking attacks us on so many levels ourself worth and ourself image in the form of unequal conditions, unequal opportunities, restrictions, continued institutionalised racism, racial cast discrimination, miseducation, and media images designed to tie negative things to being black and to rank society by colour continue unabated.
Black News recognises the doors are open for the forces of genocide, social engineering, and miseducation to get political financial and military backing and promotion far greater than the forces of liberation, black love, and black truth could ever receive such as what is needed, like major rebalancing through policy change.
You may of course disagree with Black News. either grammatically, syntactically, tactically, ideologically, or otherwise which is fine.
However let us focus on how we believe this is the case and the process and systems which keep this in place.
Black News feels the process that creates the end product has to be taken into account.
Black News believes if you take a raw material like our mainly white society does and put it through a factory assembly line, the society or factory does not leave the end product to accident?
What Black News means is that an underdevelopment system, believes that those who are not contaminated by assimilation are seen as defective products.
They are separated from the pile and destroyed.
The system is then examined so that less products go on to defective pile.
Every update to the machines means more effective control over the end product. If we are born like clay, we are shaped until we become indoctrinated.During that time, we are shaped by a lot of things that we have no filter for. Some become conscious because the system is imperfect and the human is resilient.More would be if less strong in mind, as this as we said is the end goal of the system.
Those who function in a system like this struggle to do something with it because they are not provided with tools to make use of it?
As are those who go with the system!
They face the baggage of racial caste, the biases tied to race that everyone else see's when they look at you, the power and privileges associated with your racial caste.
Think of a farm where weeds are allowed to grow and crops and flowers are killed!
A grooming process within the individual or group in reverse.
Any group in the belly of the beast will either give the beast indigestion or be digested.
This is a way to illustrate social engineering. White power does not want competition, but wants to have direct influence over your development or underdevelopment.
For this reason, criticizing a Black Group or individual is not getting to the heart of the problem if we don't see it in the context of a racist society.
Black News will now show how the myths of our problems will also empower our solutions.
{What We Get Wrong About Closing the Racial Gap.}
Black News takes a deep dive into the facts against the myths!
The racial gap in the U.K is large and shows no signs of closing. Recent datashows that black households hold less than seven pence on the pound compared to white households.
The white household living near the poverty line typically has about £14.000 in wealth, while black households in similar economic straits typically have a median wealth near zero. This means, in turn, that many black families have a negative net worth.
At the other end of the U.K’s economic spectrum, black households constitute less than 2 percent of those in the top one percent of the nation’s wealth distribution; white households constitute more than 96 percent of the wealthiest Brits. moreover, even among the nation’s wealthiest households, extreme differences persist on the basis of race:
The 99th percentile black families on average are worth a mere 2% of GDP while the 99th percentile white family is worth over 86% of GDP. This means over 272.000 white families have a net worth above £3 million , while, out of the U.K black families , fewer than 220 are even worth a single million
By comparison, over 1,8 million white brits are millionaires of the total 61 million white families.
From government statistics Black News has looked at 2020 figures which indicate that the median black household has ten pence for every pound held by the median white household, still a staggering disparity.
The UK Survey of Consumer Finances oversamples households at the upper end of the income distribution while the U.K Survey of Income and Program Participation oversamples households at the lower end of the income distribution.
Regardless which data set is used, if all vehicles are removed, including the household car, the net worth calculation, the median black household has only about three pence per pound held by the median white household.
The statistics reported here are drawn from many sources.
Black people, while constituting for just under 4 percent of the nation’s population, collectively own much less than 1% percent of the nation’s total wealth.
Patently, wealth is far more unequally distributed than income.
While income primarily is earned in the labor market, wealth is built primarily by the transfer of resources across generations, locking-in the deep divides we observe across racial groups the difference between old money and new money..
Black News.hopes In this report, we address ten commonly held myths about the racial wealth gap in the UK and US
Black News. contend that a number of ideas within the latest government reports as frequently touted as “solutions” will not make headway in reducing black-white wealth disparities.
These conventional ideas include greater educational attainment, harder work, better financial decisions, and other changes in habits and practices on the part of blacks.
While these steps are not necessarily undesirable, they are wholly inadequate to bridge the racial chasm in wealth.
These myths support a point of view that identifies dysfunctional black behaviors as the basic cause of persistent racial inequality, including the black-white wealth disparity, in the UK but are also similar in the US.
Black News will systematically demonstrate here that a narrative that places the onus of the racial wealth gap on black defectiveness is false in all of its permutations!!!
In fact Black News would go so far as to challenge the conventional set of claims that are made about the racial disparity gaps in the UK and US .
We contend that the cause of the gap must be found in the structural characteristics of the U.K and U.S economy, heavily infused at every point with both an inheritance of racism and the ongoing authority of white supremacy.
Black News pushes back against the notion that black people can close the racial wealth gap by changing their individual behavior –i.e. by assuming more “personal responsibility” or acquiring the portfolio management insights associated with “financial literacy” – if the structural sources of racial inequality remain unchanged.
There is no actions that black people can take unilaterally that will have much of an effect on reducing the racial wealth gap.
For the gap to be closed, the U.K and U.S must undergo a vast social transformation produced by the adoption of bold national policies, policies that will forge a way forward by addressing, finally, the long-standing consequences of slavery, the Jim Crow years that followed, and ongoing racism and discrimination that exist in our societies today.
Black News believes that closing the racial wealth gap requires an accurate assessment of the causes of the disparity and imaginative action to produce systemic reform and lasting change!
Addressing racial wealth inequality will require a major redistributive effort or another major public policy intervention to build black UK wealth.
This could take the form of a direct race-specific initiative like a dramatic reparations program tied to compensation for the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, and/or an initiative that addresses the perniciousness of wealth inequality for the entire UK and US population, which could disproportionately benefit black people due to their exceptionally low levels of wealth. Indeed, the two strategies -- reparations for all black UK and US citizens and the record of racial injustice or the provision of the equivalent of a substantial trust fund for every wealth poor UK and US citizen, need not be mutually exclusive.
In what follows, we come to grips with the most important, widely held myths about closing the racial wealth gap.
Myth1:
Greater educational attainment or more work effort on the part of black people will close the racial wealth gap?
A common-sense hypothesis ascribes disparities in wealth mainly to differences in the level of education. A university degree is associated with higher earnings and more stable employment, even in times of economic crisis.
Families with university -educated heads appear to accumulate more wealth than families with heads with lower levels of education over a lifetime. Therefore, higher education often has been touted as the “great equalizer”, as a mechanism to reduce the wealth gap between whites and blacks?
According to this logic, we would expect blacks and whites with similar levels of education to display comparable levels of wealth.
When you compare wealth levels for heads of households with the same educational attainment across racial groups.
Both for blacks and whites, median household wealth increases as the head of household obtains higher levels of 5 education.
However, it is apparent that for blacks getting a college degree, or a graduate degree is far from sufficient to close the wealth gap?
At every level of educational attainment, the median wealth among black families is substantially lower than white families.
White households with a bachelor’s degree or post- graduate education (such as with a Ph.D., MD, and JD) are more than three times as wealthy as black households with the same degree attainment.
Moreover, on average, a black household with a college-educated head has less wealth than a white family whose head did not even obtain a high school diploma. It takes a post- graduate education for a black family to have comparable levels of wealth to a white household with some college education or an associate degree, using many different "Panel Studies of Income Dynamics" however in the UK this is increasing more rapidly.
Furthermore, low family wealth can have also have an adverse effect on the next generation’s educational attainment!
Family wealth is a predictor of both college attendance and college completion. Black students are more likely to take on student loans and accumulate student loan debt, and they are more likely than white students to drop-out of a university because of financial concerns. Ironically, their wealth position could deteriorate because of their intense motivation to pursue higher education.
Another commonly held misconception is that black families have a cultural predisposition to under-value education.
Black parents are alleged to invest insufficiently in their children’s education.?
However, the best evidence indicates that black families, controlling for household type and socioeconomic status, tend to be more supportive than white families of their children’s education through direct financial support.
Indeed black parents who provide some support for their children’s higher education have two- thirds of the median net worth of white parents who provide no support for their children’s higher education. For given levels of household income, parental educational attainment, and/or parental occupational status, black youth also get more years of schooling and acquire more credentials than white youth whose parents have a similar status.
While education does not appear to be the great equalizer, it could be argued, alternatively, that hard work can close the wealth gap. Since blacks face a higher unemployment rate than whites at every level of education, the difference in wealth ultimately could be due to the difference in employment status. If that were the case, we would observe similar levels of wealth for blacks and whites with similar employment statuses.
However figures can contradicts such an expectation. As one would expect, the median household
wealth is higher for employed families than for unemployed families in both races.
However white households with an employed head have more than ten times higher wealth than similar black households. Furthermore, white households with an unemployed head have a higher net worth than black households with a head who is working full time.
In addition, higher levels of household income are not associated with significant reductions in the racial wealth gap. and can show how black families have much lower wealth than white families even when they have comparable earnings.
In particular, black households in the lowest 20 percent of the income distribution essentially have zero net worth, while the poorest white families have on average £14,000 - £17,000 in net worth.
Even belonging to the highest quintile does not make black families as wealthy as whites: their median wealth is approximately half of that of white families in the same income quintile.
This pattern is evident: studying hard and working hard clearly is not enough for black families to make up for their marginalized financial position.
Myth2:
The racial homeownership gap is the “driver” of the racial wealth gap
Differences in homeownership rates remain the prime driver of the nation’s racial wealth gap. Eliminating disparities in homeownership rates and returns would substantially reduce the racial wealth gap, while interest deductions for home-owners “drive” the racial wealth gap.
After all, the typical household, regardless of race, holds most of its wealth in home equity. Since black families own homes at substantially lower ratesthan their white counterparts, the argument has it that if blacks only achieved rates of home ownership similar to whites, the racial wealth gap would be eliminated.
The word “drive” suggests a causal link between homeownership/home equity and intergenerational wealth. However, a major flaw in this reasoning is that, by definition, homeownership/home equity is a component of wealth. Hence, the statement that “homeownership drives wealth” is equivalent to saying that “wealth drives wealth.
As discussed below under Myth 5, blacks with positive wealth do tend to have a greater share of their asset portfolio in homeownership than whites, since a home is the largest (usually) non-depreciating major asset held by most households, regardless of race. Nonetheless, in the aggregate, whites have considerably more resources than blacks, greater home equity and also higher values in every other type of asset.
Furthermore, empirically, the evidence simply does not support the claim that the racial homeownership gap explains the racial wealth gap. Figure 4 shows median household wealth by homeownership rates. For those households who do not own a home, wealth levels are low for both white and black households; however black non-homeowner households have a mere £120 in net worth – insufficient to feed a family for a week. The data indicates that white households who are not home-owners hold 31-times more wealth than black households that do not.
Among households that own a home, white households have nearly £140,000 more in net worth than black households. While the wealth ratio between whites and blacks may narrow somewhat among those who own a home, a six-figure wealth differential remains. Clearly increased homeownership is far from sufficient to close the racial wealth gap.
Homeownership and wealth are clearly correlated, but it is a severe misstatement to claim that if blacks owned homes at the same rate as whites the racial wealth gap would be closed. To be sure, a sizeable difference in ownership rates exists, as well as a dramatic difference in home equity across black and white homeowners.
While closing the gap in homeownership rates may have some benefits, the story is complicated. Indeed.
Assets will vary across context, including geographic location. Nonetheless, a major underlying difference in homeownership rates is an initial difference in endowments.
The wealth-gap across homeownership status may be explained by the fact that a home is one of the only assets in which the race of the owner affects the rate of return.
Further, the idea that homeownership creates wealth simply may put the relationship backward. Rather than homeownership creating wealth, having family wealth in the first place leads to homeownership, particularly high equity homeownership. As we discussed in the introduction, blacks have minimal initial wealth to invest in homes or pass down to their children to assist with down payments.
Our research also suggests that when black households do obtain some wealth, one of the first assets they purchase, similar to others, is a house. But without sufficient wealth in the first place, households have limited means to invest in homeownership. Wealth, after all, begets more wealth.
While achieving parity in homeownership and rates of return on housing is certainly a worthwhile goal that might improve economic security, stability and fairness, it is a widely held myth that improving homeownership rates amongst black households will close the racial wealth gap.
Today, simply advocating the purchase of a new home will not overcome the existing gap produced by national policies. As illustrated above, even blacks who own their home encounter a large racial disparity in home values. If the goal truly is to eliminate the racial wealth gap, policymakers should be concerned with providing, at the very least, an initial, significant financial endowment to black young adults to invest in an asset like a new home, as well as an aggressive campaign against housing and lending discrimination, which limits the asset appreciation of the housing stock and financial products available to blacks.
Myth3: Buying and banking black will close the racial wealth gap?
Looking at the US in his famed 1968 speech “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” Martin Luther King Jr. called for a ‘bank-in’ movement.
To assert black independence, King called on his followers to “strengthen black institutions” by taking “your money out of the banks downtown and deposit your money in Tri-State Bank,” a black owned bank. This idea, that buying and banking from black owned businesses will empower the black community and close the racial wealth gap, has been widely embraced, historically by a diverse array of Americans including Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Richard Nixon, and, recently, by the #BankBlack movement.
From this perspective, if only black consumers would invest in their own countries and communities, turning inward for solutions to their economic woes, rather than asking the state for a handout, they would become economically self-sufficient and eventually thrive. After all, the premise works as follows.
A group with a low profile of achievement does not have to persuade members of the dominant group to embrace policies to repair the out- group that may impose costs on the dominant group.
Everything ultimately can be solved internally with the right amount of spit and polish.
Rather than creating an inclusive and just economy that does not greatly disadvantage a group solely based on their race, politicians across the aisle embraced the idea of buying and banking black. In 1968, the same year King called for a ‘bank-in,’ none other than presidential hopeful Richard Nixon came out endorsing “black capitalism”.
In his speech to the Republican National Convention, Nixon proclaimed:
Instead of government jobs, and government housing, and government welfare, let government use its tax and credit policies to enlist in this battle [against poverty] the greatest engine of progress ever developed in the history of man—American private enterprise.
Black capitalism, in Nixon’s eyes, was the solution. So while white America received ample government support through public policies to build and maintain wealth, black Americans were offered a deficient private sector strategy (Katznelson 2005). Black capitalism was a solution that would allow the government to hand over the economic “problems” ofpoverty and insufficient wealth in the black community to the community itself, effectively ridding the government of responsibility.
But black businesses and banks cannot thrive on a separate and unequal playing field. For instance, in the U.S. black banks are smaller and less profitable than similar white institutions.
This is not because the black-owned institutions lack a strong business model or viable leaders, but because of the economic situation of the communities where they operate and their own disparate levels of access to start-up and developmental finance.
For instance, since black families have minimal liquid wealth, their bank accounts tend to hold money for day-to-day and week-to-week expenses. Small and unstable deposits due to continued economic penalties forced upon black workers and households makes profitability a significant challenge for these banks. In the end, if black banks and businesses are a supposed solution to the racial wealth gap, we must address a basic math problem that arises: to close the gap, black banks and enterprises must earn a much higher rate of return than white businesses. Without this condition being met, the gap only will be perpetuated rather than ended.
What is the state of black business in the UK today? A recent report by the Association for Enterprise Opportunity indicates that 97.000 black businesses in the UK. black-owned businesses, only generate 2 billion in revenue. Unfortunately, this represents negligible ownership and control over the nation’s productive capacity.
While black-owned banks also are miniscule in the context of the general scale of even American banking.
The largest five black owned banks recently were estimated to have assets totaling £2.3 billion, while J.P. Morgan alone had an estimated £2 trillion in assets. Thus, the top five black banks’ assets were a tiny 0.1 percent of Morgan’s assets This indicates that the existing infrastructure of black-owned banks lacks the capacity to produce wide and substantial increases in black wealth. Even if they were to double, triple, or quadruple their assets, black banks would not be major players in the british economic landscape.
Measurement for corporations to better market their products. “Power” here has nothing to do with actual economic strength and there is no collective £1+ trillion that Black people have and just foolishly spend ignorantly to their economic detriment.
Myth 4 The conceptions of “buying power”
Functions as propaganda working to deny the reality of structural, intentional and necessary economic inequality required to maintain society as it is, one that benefits an increasingly decreasing number of people.
Note, also, even if we accept the estimated £1.2 trillion total of “black buying power” as valid in the US, it still is only a percent of the value of J.P. Morgan’s total assets.
A strategy for closing the racial wealth gap currently in the UK if popular circulation is to have each of the nation’s 1.8 million black contribute £10 a month (£120 a year) to a fund to support black owned banks who, in turn, will finance further development of black owned businesses?
But the total amount of that fund would only come to £32 millon, a tiny speck in overall wealth and national income.
The key to assisting black businesses in their development and growth lies in leveling the terrain of racial wealth differences and increasing black entrée to start-up and developmental capital in the first place?
Prior research has confirmed that individuals with access to family wealth both directly, through transfers from immediate family members, and, indirectly, through kin networks, have markedly higher rates of entrepreneurship and are more likely to start larger businesses.
While some may argue that the “wealthy tend to make better entrepreneurs others argue strongly that “the data reject this explanation,” and that the levels of capital required to start businesses systematically exclude non-wealthy individuals, regardless of their entrepreneurial talent. Thus, with the denial of black wealth accumulation and with the continued exclusion of blacks from business credit markets, blacks simply do not have access to the necessary resources to build corporations that can be players in a global economy
We must make it clear that we have no objection to banking black or buying black. In the interest of black solidarity, the idea has great merit.
Myth 5
Black people saving more will close the racial wealth gap?
Looking at the US the findings in advanced in peer reviewed articles in economic journals is clear: there is no evidence that black Americans or have a lower savings rate than white Americans once household income is taken into account .
For example,using accumalated data tracking the financial position of black and white families and found that, once income is controlled, if anything, black families actually have a slightly higher savings rate than their white counterparts?
This mild savings rate advantage is indicative of even greater thriftiness among blacks, since they typically have more kin obligations to assist low-income relatives which, further reduces the ability to save. If anything, it appears that blacks generally live more frugal lives than whites; a study conducted by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy using the 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances found that, at comparable levels of income, whites spend 1.3 times more than blacks.
Nonetheless, the conventional wisdom has it that blacks in search of immediate gratification lack self-control and are plagued, uniquely, by a culture of frivolous consumerism. This belief was magnified by Ronald Reagan’s use of the “welfare queen” trope during his campaign, and, recently, via internet financial gurus pushing images of black America spending money on Jordan brand Nike shoes, rather than household needs. Yet, the empirical evidence indicates that it has not been the case historically, nor is it the case today, that blacks are more financially wasteful than whites. In addition to this we found that blacks have a slightly higher savings rate than whites.
However, studies claim there is a white savings advantage with regards to pension accounts. Using a sample of 57 large companies.
First, it is not clear from data whether or how income, job tenure and age are controlled. For example, the study compares participation rates across race, not in a continuous way, but at various income categories. The lowest participation rate difference, 92 versus 91 percent, occurs in the highest income category – those for instance in the UK earning above £120,000, while the widest participation rate difference, six percentage points (56 versus 50 percent), occurs in the lowest income category – those earning below £30,000. Nevertheless, the report states that blacks, overall, are seven percent less likely participate in retirment plans after controlling for salary, age and job tenure.
After controlling for incomes, it is inconsistent for the overall racial participation rate differential to be seven percent, while the largest percentage point difference within each of their defined income categories is at most six percentage points. This would suggest an unlikely scenario that blacks are better positioned in terms of salary within the defined income brackets and/or have longer job tenure and/or are older on average.
Also, the unit of analysis data can be individual rather than the family. This is relevant since wealth generally is measured at the family or household level, and savings decisions are often made at the family level. Individual income controls are inadequate to determine family savings rate “behavior,” since saving decisions are based on the entire family’s expenses and income flows.
Furthermore, 60 percent of the black sample in this study consists of women in comparison with 48 percent for whites.
Given racial differences in marriage rates, using individual, rather than family income, masks the potential lower resources to save in the black sample.
Disparities for Women and Minorities in Retirement cited a more nationally representative study by the Center on Retirement
Research, which finds no residual difference in pension savings observed.
Myth 6
Greater financial literacy will close the racial wealth gap.
Many have argued that, all too often, the framing of the racial wealth gap focuses on poor financial choices and decisions on the part of blacks. Evidence put forth to make the case for black financial illiteracy includes blacks’ disproportionate use of alternative financial service products, like payday loans, auto-title loans, and check cashing institutions. These financial services have fees and interest payments that far exceed more conventional options?
Other evidence put forth also includes racial variations in portfolio composition in which the blacks have a much larger share of their assets in the form of home equity.
Here, blacks are characterized as making the suboptimal decision to invest.
In “low-return” housing assets instead of higher yield financial assets
For many with any significant level of wealth, home equity makes up a predominant amount of their assets. The consumption value of homeownership, including access to schools and other desirable neighborhood amenities, and the tax-preferred status of owning a home, should be considered when examining portfolio shares. Regardless of race, historically a home is the first major asset purchased by most.
The key point is whites generally have more resources to invest at the outset—not only do they invest more in homeownership, they invest more in financial assets too. Basically, whites have more of every asset simply because they have more resources. Have observed that “...attributing the racial wealth gap to a more diverse asset portfolio for whites is ambiguous at best, given that it is wealth in the first place that is associated with having a more diverse asset portfolio.”
The problem with assigning differences in cost of finance and asset portfolios to difference in financial acumen is its directional emphasis.
Meager economic circumstances—not poor decision making or deficient knowledge—constrain choices and leave asset-poor borrowers with little to no other option but to use predatory and abusive alternative financial services.
A negligible level of economic resources readily explains why blacks, specifically, use more predatory financial institutions.
This argument obviously contradicts many premises!
Myth 7Financilal iresponsibility ?
More recent work by Black News cited here has been expanded to emphasize financial circumstances as an alternative to financial choice as explanation for racial differences in certain portfolio compositions.
Projections reveal that the use of predatory financial products and alternative financial services are often last-resort finance options for economically fragile borrowers after all other options, including borrowing from family and friends, have been exhausted.
As we have noted above, wealth begets more wealth.
Higher levels of wealth enable greater access to more favorable terms for credit.
Wealth provides individuals and families with financial agency and choice; it provides economic security to take risks and shields against the risk of economic loss.
Basically, wealth is cumulative. It provides people with the necessary capital to secure finance and purchase an appreciating asset, which in turn, will generate more and more wealth. Literally, it takes wealth to make wealth, while blacks largely have been excluded from intergenerational access to capital and finance.
It merits noting, again, that Black News cited in the previous section, which used panel data long prior to predatory subprime mortgage lending crisis, did not find a significant racial difference in asset appreciation rates for households with positive assets, once household income is taken into account.
This result emerged despite the well-documented evidence of historical and ongoing housing and lending discrimination.
There is also a presumption that, as a result of financial irresponsibility, blacks carry much greater debt than whites, but, this presumption is not valid. We find that, overall, a slightly larger share of white families has unsecured debt than black families. Furthermore, after controlling for basic socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, the study finds no significant difference in the value of black and white family unsecured debt holdings.
When looking at US unsecured debt is disaggregated into three categories: (1) store bills and credit card debt, (2) loans from a bank or credit union, and (3) “other” types of debts, including student loans and medical bills, it is only the “other” category in which there is a statistically significant racial difference in unsecured debt—21.5 percent for black families and 19 percent for white families. This debt category represents borrowing for school and other critical needs, including medical care.
We can demonstrate that among relatively better-off students who are able to attend college, blacks are 25 percent more likely to accumulate student debt and, on average, borrow 10 percent more than their white counterparts.
The adverse implications of the liability produced by these racial differences in self-investment debt are compounded by the fact that black students are one-third less likely to complete their degrees, often because of the greater financial burden that precipitated student loan borrowing in the first place.
We found that in the US 29 percent of black students who leave college after their first year do so for financial reasons.
Student loan debt and mortgage debt traditionally have provided access to the finance needed to purchase an appreciating asset such as a house or secure a job in the professional or managerial sector. In effect mortgage debt and student loan debt may be considered a form of “good debt,” especially in comparison to other types of debt.
And In terms of student loan debt, there is evidence that for-profit colleges and universities, which often issue misleading claims about graduation and job placement rates, disproportionately enroll and target black student. Ads for these colleges were ubiquitous in communities of color, on commercials , at bus stops etc, and in other places where black and brown people congregated.
They enlisted leaders in the black community to advertise on their behalf.
Like credit card debt, which is often associated with consumption or some good that rapidly depreciates in value however, the implication of so-called “good debt” has different meaning, once we consider race and the prevailing framework of subjecting a marginalized racial group to inferior housing and educational products, predatory finance, and labor market discrimination.
Also relevant is the intensifying context of economic precarity and income volatility with blacks in particular, increasingly have less control of when and for how long they work.
This makes access to short-term credit, including credit card debt, an essential element in management of household budgets, particularly for vulnerable households without the financial cushion of liquid assets. Pressure to utilize credit cards to balance household budgets in the midst of expense and income volatility continues despite substantial reported disdain for their use.
As stated above, it is ultimately racial differences in initial endowments of and access to financial resources that sustain and fuel the racial wealth gap. white families tend to have greater access to mortgages, and credit than black and Latino families. Even when black and Latino homeowners are able to secure mortgages, they experience higher rates of foreclosure and housing distress than white families, in part because they are systematically offered riskier loans. This obviously has implications with regards to Myth 2, that the racial homeownership gap is the “driver” of the racial wealth gap as well.
Furthermore, home equity for especially black American homeowners has not increased at the same rate as it has for white homeowners largely because home values in the neighborhoods to which blacks have been systematically restricted, have been slow to recover since thehousing crisis.
Consequently, they also have generated lower returns on mortgage debt. Other research suggests that inheritances and other intergenerational wealth transfers often benefit white families more than black families.
Greater financial literacy can be valuable if an individual or household has finances to manage. Financial literacy without finance is meaningless. There is no magical way to transform no wealth into great wealth simply by learning more about how to manage one’s monetary resources. While wealth begets wealth, typically no wealth begets no wealth, regardless of how astute a money manager the person may be.
As a result of the higher finance costs and lower appreciation rates, data should urge those promoting homeownership as a mechanism to bridge the racial wealth gap to be circumspect.
The higher the percentage of blacks in the neighborhood, the less the home is worth, even when researchers control for age, social class, household structure, and geography.”
Myth 8 Entrepreneurship will close the racial wealth gap looking specifically at the US
Entrepreneurship has long been praised as a route to eliminate racial wealth inequality.
As an adjunct to Myth 3, entrepreneurship has been identified as a path to the phantasm of black capitalism. For at least three decades, internet wealth gurus, black and white, have told people if they only left salaried employment and struck out on their own, they could get rich like the late 19th century robber barons. The problem has neither been borne out by the evidence, nor has it proven to be accurate advice under current circumstances. Not all of the effects of successful large-scale entrepreneurship are salutary, it can also destabilize communities.
The most successful entrepreneurship is disruptive — a term entrepreneurs these days have donned as a magic mantle: “We have a disruptive business model, a disruptive technology, and will disrupt the market” goes the startup pitch.
Amazonhas disrupted book stores and other retail chains, Zipcar disrupted car rentals, Netflix is disrupting cinemas and cable companies, Airbnb disrupts hotels, and Bitcoin may disrupt the payment industry. But the meaning of “disruptive” was never meant to be pure and all-positive: its synonyms include “troublemaking,” “disorderly,” “disturbing,” “unsettling,” and “upsetting”
Not only does successful large-scale entrepreneurship have a disruptive effect on existing businesses, it can accentuate the wealth divide between rich and poor. It often creates some of the worst social outcomes by grossly exacerbating rather than closing the racial wealth gap.
The problem is entrepreneurship, when successful, always leads to local income inequality, at least in the short and medium run, and ironically, the more successful the entrepreneurship, the more extreme the inequality. ... But on the negative side, the newly wealthy can now afford to bypass, for example, the local public school system or health care services if they don’t think they are good enough, draining public institutions’ vital resources. The wealth can also dramatically drive up the proximal cost of living: Properties will get reassessed, driving taxes up when neighbors pay millions for the house next door. The cost of some local services may also increase sharply, from cars to high-end restaurants to babysitting.
In addition, we have shown that the significant edge in entrepreneurship held by white males originates in their serendipitous birth into more affluent families.
No better example is available than billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, owner of Facebook, who, while often touted as self-made, in fact according to businessinsider.com purportedly received initial working capital from his professional father in 2004, in exchange for shares in Facebook that are now worth millions. Another good example is billionaire Jeff Bezos, who started Amazon in 1994 with a $300,000 loan from his parents.
In general, the net effect of entrepreneurship is to recycle an expanding – often an outrageously expanding -- circuit of wealth among members of an upper class of whiteplayers. In the 21st century, the number of persons coming from poverty, whether white or black, to enter the ranks of the super-rich via entrepreneurship are infinitesimally small.
When we compile the data even those members of marginalized communities who manage to enter into entrepreneurship largely fail. This is due to a number of factors ranging from under-capitalization, limited market access, or outright theft or destruction.
Blacks are far less likely to own a business, and for blacks that do own a business they have far less equity. Black business literally has been annihilated nearly as often as it has sprouted in America, dating back to the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, the razing of one of the nation’s historically prosperous black communities dubbed at the time as a “Black Wall Street”
In reality the data paints a daunting picture for diversity in entrepreneurship. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Survey of Business Owners (SBO), which is conducted every five years, over 90 percent of Latino and black firms’ do not have even one employee other than the owners. The proportion of owner only firms reaches a high of close to 98 percent for the sub-group of black female led businesses. When blacks do own a business the return to that business is lower than that of whites and falls well short of closing the racial wealth gap.
Businesses with paid employees have a much greater economic impact than those without employees. The annual sales of businesses without employees are on average only a fraction of the sales of businesses with employees. While there are some firms without employees that are very successful financially, the majority are not. ... 67.3 percent of firms without employees had annual sales of less than $25,000. Any profits these firms made—if they did make profits—would only be a fraction of the total sales. This means that many firms without employees do not make enough to keep their owners and their owners’ families out of poverty if the firm is the owner’s sole source of income. On the other hand, a majority (57.9 percent) of businesses with paid employees had annual sales of more than $249,999. It is more likely that these firms are earning profits for their owners.
If the number of people-of-color firms were proportional to their distribution in the labor force, people of color would own 1.1 million more businesses with employees. These firms would add about 9 million jobs and about $300 billion in workers’ income to the U.S. economy.”
In short, the composition of entrepreneurship type would need to be dramatically different in terms of ethnic and class makeup to have a net positive effect on the racial wealth gap.
Yet, even if blacks had the same business ownership rate as whites, the question of the scale and profitability of the business still would be an issue. If we narrowed the black- white difference in business ownership, it would not necessarily result in the reduction of black-white difference in the value of businesses.
Whites, for example, are more likely than any other racial or ethnic group to be business owners. Twelve percent of whites are entrepreneurs compared to 11 percent of Asians, 8 percent of Latinos, and only 6 percent of Blacks. ... For the 8 and 6 percent of Latinos and Blacks that respectively engage in business ownership, the median net worth of Black ($91,500) and Hispanic ($81,391) business owners is each over 10 times higher than the median net worth (inclusive of home equity) of Blacks and Hispanics generally ($91,500 vs. $7,113 and $81,391 vs. $8,113 respectively). While entrepreneurship clearly provides increased wealth outcomes to people of color, a tremendous wealth gap remains. The median net worth of Black and Latino households is still less than a third of the median overall net worth of White business owners ($287,166)
Data from the Small Business Administration indicates that just over 19 million businesses, or 70.9 percent of all U.S. businesses, are white owned. Blacks own about 2.6 million businesses or 9.5 percent of all U.S. businesses, and Latinos own 3.3 million businesses or 12.2 percent of all American businesses. But the sales, and employment numbers tell a more depressing story. The 19 million white owned businesses have 88 percent of the overall sales, and control 86.5 percent of U.S. employment, while black businesses have a mere 1.3 percent of total American sales, and 1.7 percent of the nation’s employees.
Latino businesses have 4 percent of U.S. sales and 4.2 percent of U.S. employment?
No amount of tutorials or online courses from wealth experts can change the reality of the racialized advantages and disadvantages that undergird entrepreneurship in America.
In a 2010 study the Minority Business Development Agency found that white business owners started their businesses with an average of $106,702 in capital, compared to $35,205 for African-American-owned businesses. We must keep in mind the primary reason for business failure is low capitalization at the start, and blacks begin the entrepreneurship game with low capital finance, reinforcing the theme that wealth begets wealth.
Even since President Nixon’s emphasis on “Black Capitalism,” (see Myth 3) no administration has offered the transformative policy changes to create any significant support for black business development. We did not see it under the Obama Administration and we are not seeing it under the Trump administration.
During the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship Summit President Obama called entrepreneurs a form of social glue and also stated that "entrepreneurship remains the engine of growth". All while under President Obama, Small Business Administration loans dropped substantially for black Americans.
Black borrowers received 1.7 percent of the $23.09 billion in total SBA loans. The percentage is down sharply from 8.2 percent of overall SBA loan volume in fiscal 2008 [Under President Bush]. By number of loans, black-owned small businesses got 2.3 percent of the federal agency’s roughly 54,000 loans last year, down from 11 percent in 2008.
Robust black entrepreneurship also will require an environment where the racial wealth disparity already has been confronted and altered directly. Greater black wealth, and hence financial capital, is the vital prerequisite for greater black entrepreneurship, rather than vice versa’s overemphasis.
Myth 9 Emulating successful minorities will close the racial wealth gap?
Some of the reason why certain ethnic, or “cultural groups” as they call them, achieve relatively high levels of economic success compared to others (read: blacks, most Latinos, and Native Americans), is a result of superior group traits not possessed by the others.
Using circumstantial and other evidence, including comparative household income and occupational status across particular social groups, the argument rehashes a now half-century old “culture of poverty”
This theory, as applied, holds that “self-sabotaging” group to individual-level values learned under the conditions of concentrated poverty are recycled intergenerationally and constitute a barrier toward favorable economic outcomes.
This can include behavioral impediments to being able to acquire and hold down a job, an indifference toward educational attainment, saving or general asset building practices, and other alleged negative group-level attributes, including a predisposition toward pathological family structures.
In the past, much of what is commonly referred to as the “model minority” narrative has relied on the perceived bootstrap success of American Jews and other southern European immigrant groups, and, more recently, select Asian, Latino, Caribbean and African immigrant communities. Notwithstanding the diverse, complex social and economic make- up of these groups in the first place, the immigrant success trope has yielded the problematic inference that “if they can do it, why can’t you?”13 With blame centered on black and Latino communities, the contemporary claim that “if they only acted right” perpetuates the myth that by emulating successful minorities, subaltern groups can close the racial wealth gap by their own unilateral efforts.
Take the Cuban-American and Korean communities for example, which, if we examine the groups using income alone, appear to provide prima facie evidence for the immigrant success trope.
But the “lateral mobility” that the relative social position held by the majority of adult immigrants in their country of origin will be regained by their children. In short, so-called “successful” immigrant groups actually retrieve a comparable class position as the one they held in their country of originpre-migration capital, whether embodied in their education and training or their financial resources, is critical in determining their outcomes in the United States.
Furthermore, this does not take into direct account other structural factors and national policies, including the selectivity of documented immigration (which favors more “skilled” immigrant groups) and any official support provided for particular immigrant groups by the state. For example, while the favorable class position and predominantly white phenotype of the initial 1960s arrivals from Cuba has been well-documented, there is less attention paid to the role of the Cuban Refugee Program.
By 1994 the program had invested more than $1 billion in successful integration of the community through resettlement resources, housing and educational training and other programs.
For Koreans, who have been hailed as a successful immigrant group due to their savvy entrepreneurship, what generally is ignored is the fact that the immigrant community that has come to the United States is a highly self-selected sample (educated, urban, middle class). They have been able to provide opportunities for themselves by bringing substantial start-up capital with them.
Perversely, discrimination against blacks by default assisted Korean entrepreneurs in many US cities where they share urban spaces, institutions played a role in their perceived “group-based” success.
While their own exposure to discrimination in America’s labor markets has played a role in leading to Korean over-concentration in self- employment, the role of government agencies in actively supporting Korean business development is disregarded far too often.
If we stay with the US as this is the data we have, we look at groups based upon their wealth position instead of their income, it is even more apparent that the “if they only acted right” narrative falls flat on its face. For instance, let us apply the embedded belief in the immigrant success trope that the wealth gap is due largely to blacks “not valuing” education.
In two recent reports, Bootstraps Are for Black Kids and Umbrellas Don't Make it Rain authors consistently found, as noted above under Myth 1, that black families hold a longstanding commitment toward their children’s education. Black families attempt to exercise that commitment despite having considerably less income and wealth to draw upon than whites.
Data indicates that the median income of black parents who provided some financial support for their children’s higher education was $44,640, while it was $63,346 for white parents who did not. The discrepancy was even more pronounced for wealth. The median net worth of black parents who provided some financial support for their children’s higher education was $24,887, while it was $73,878 for white parents, again, who did not.
Furthermore, the typical U.S. white household with a head who held a college degree had $268,000 in wealth, compared with $70,000 for a black household with a comparably educated head – slightly less than a staggering $200,000 difference
White households with heads who reported having completed some college but did not finish their degrees, still possessed substantially more wealth (net worth) than the typical black household with a head who finished a college degree. Most astonishing is the fact that black households with a head with a college degree were substantially more “wealth- poor” than whites who never finished their high school diplomas.
Additional evidence that contradicts the model minority myth is drawn from regional variation in the wealth position of so-called “model” minority groups themselves. For instance, the National Asset Scorecard for Communities of Color (NASCC) project reveals that the Korean family median wealth of $496,000 ranks amongst the highest in the Washington, DC metropolitan area, while their median wealth of $23,400 in the Los Angeles metropolitan area where they make up a much larger share of the population, ranks amongst the lowest of all ethnic groups in many studies across such large regional intra-ethnic variation in wealth is not indicative of a consistent ethnically based cultural predisposition toward economic success.
In short, the argument that intergroup disparities in wealth are borne out of group based cultural/behavioral deficiencies is misleading and misdirected. Instead, we should focus on the long exposure of low wealth racial/ethnic groups to theft of wealth and blockades on wealth accumulation.
To suggest that blacks, racialized Latinos and Native Americans should emulate other supposedly successful “minority” groups perpetuates, the false narrative that their asset poverty is due to a lack of hard work, effort, or ambition.
Myth 10 Improved “soft skills” and “personal responsibility” will close the racial wealth gap?
In More than just race, some argue that both structural and cultural factors interact to perpetuate persistent racial economic inequality in the United States.
This invokes an example from larger changes in the economy to illustrate any thesis.
Proposing that the structural shift from manufacturing to service sector jobs in the U.S. economy had a particularly devastating effect in isolating black male workers, we then say their isolation has occurred because these jobs require a set of “soft skills” that black men frequently do not possess.
Defined loosely as “employability,” “soft skills” ostensibly are necessary to produce job opportunities and occupational mobility. These skills can range from promptness tointerpersonal and collaborative skills that employers might seek in potential candidates.
At the level of individual behaviors, this can include the negative effects of the widely-held belief that blacks have a tendency to show up late to work, to hold an oppositional-attitude toward the work environment, to be rude to customers, and/or to be uncooperative and unfriendly with co-workers.
Although much focus is on labor markets, the cultural deficiency trope is often used to explain racial disparities more broadly.
From this perspective, if blacks simply learn and apply those so-called “soft skills,” their labor market experiences, earnings and income will improve, thereby, closing the wealth gap.
The implication is if blacks just acquire the requisite “soft skills,” then, presumably, employment, income, and wealth gaps will close as well
There are two major reasons why this belief is incorrect.
First, if it is true that blacks (and racialized Latino communities, for that matter) need to adjust their individual behavior -- hence learn and apply these motivation-situated “soft skills” to invite the conditions that close the wealth gap -- what explains the crowding of blacks and Latino at the lower end of the labor market (those very “service sector” jobs!), while their absence from the better paying, upper echelons remains apparent, even when they have appropriate educational credentials? Wefound that when taking educational attainment into account, black men are overrepresented in low wage jobs that require interpersonal contact and underrepresented in higher-paying jobs that do not require these “soft skills.” or more background?
Also absence from the construction industry affords powerful evidence against Myth 8. Black men already are largely located in service sector jobs that require, or depend, on “soft- skills.” It is not “soft skills” requirements that distinguish black and white male sites of employment. It is relatively lower pay in the jobs held by the former and relatively higher pay in jobs held.Second, it is important to stress that, contrary to conventional wisdom, earnings and other types of income are not key determinants of wealth.
Deliberate acts of personal savings out of earnings and other types of income do not actually play the fabled role assigned to them in the process of wealth accumulation. The linchpin for wealth accumulation is the transfer of resources across generations, maintaining higher wealth positions among parents and grandparents for their children and grandchildren.
Earnings and other types of income are derivative from opportunities created by the wealth position of one’s parents (and grandparents).
In sum, much of the “soft skills” trope repeats the conventional trope that individuals should simply “act right,” “pull up their pants” and hold and apply the same “personal responsibility” centered values that supposedly successful immigrant groups possess (see the discussion of Myth 7 above).
While some individuals can indeed “get ahead or beat the odds,” the larger structural conditions, well-document wage and unemployment gaps, demonstrate that even when black people “do the right thing,” it does not close the racial wealth gap.
More personal responsibility or motivation on the part of blacks is not what is needed. Rather, what is needed is an active program of wealth redistribution and the removal of structural and discriminatory obstacles that stand in the way of bridging the wealth divide.
Myth1 11 The growing numbers of black celebrities prove the racial wealth gap is closing?
Looking at the US again as far back as the early days of Motown, black celebrity has played a prominent role in the American consciousness.
But starting during the early 1980s, the image of the position of overall black wealth came to be projected through the lives of a small set of famous black Americans. Unfortunately, from “The Cosby Show” to Michael Jackson’s multi-platinum albums to Will Smith’s meteoric rise to the present day mega couple Jay-Z and Beyoncé, black celebrity has masked black poverty, rather than contributed to closing the racial wealth gap.
No other ethnic or racial groups, –not Asians, not Latinos, and not whites – have been framed so dramatically through celebrity status as black Americans. Despite recently released 2016 Federal Reserve data showing that the median black family has a net worth of about $17,600, while the median white family has a net worth closer to $170,000 (Jan 2017), black life has come to be seen through the lens of radically exceptional cases, rather than typical ones.
The ascendency of blacks to the most elite positions of society has been put forth to make the case for a grand racial progress in America. These cases of black exceptionalism have been held out as prima facie examples of what individual or familial acts of perseverance and hard work can achieve.
No singular show played a more prominent role in this shift in view than the “Cosby Show”, which aired on NBC from 1984-1992. The article “Cosby Show Dreams African American Financial Realities” made the following observation about the program:
Yet, despite this positive impact on the exceptional black individuals’ acceptance into white America’s psyche, it may have done the opposite for America’s ability to relate to the average black family’s struggles that resulted from a legacy of Jim Crow and slavery.
For a generation of white Americans that had little contact with black America in daily life, the apathy Thursday nights with the Huxtables created toward the experience of black struggle has been understated. The idea that if Cliff Huxtable did it you can too rang loudly in expectations of black progress.
Post-Cosby black progress came to be signaled by the historic rise of African American media billionaire Oprah Winfrey, leaving little space for empathy for everyday black families struggling under the pressures of economic deprivation in America’s urban centers.
The celebrity-esque image of President Obama only furthered this perception. The election of Barack Obama to the highest office was trumpeted by many as the arrival of a post- racial America.
The president himself was complicit in using his ascendancy in this regard.
Playing on standard tropes about black American life, President Obama reportedly told Israel’s Prime Minister “I’m the African-American son of a single mother, and I live here, in this house. I live in the White House.”
The implication of this type of rhetoric is a shift in American sentiment away from a public responsibility for the low wealth of the general body of black Americans, to a view of famous aberrations as a false lens suggesting that all black Americans finally had arrived at full access to the American dream.
Consider the recently released GOP Tax Reform proposal. Rather than use the abundance of wealthy whites as an example to illustrate American wealth inequality, Republicans made gratuitous use of NBA player Stephen Curry, an extreme black outlier, as an example of the American rich:
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act includes specific safeguards to prevent tax avoidance and help ensure taxpayers of all income levels play by the rules under this new fairer, simpler tax system. Our legislation will ensure this much-needed tax relief goes to the local job creators it’s designed to help by distinguishing between the individual wage income of NBA All-Star Stephen Curry and the pass-through business income of Steve’s Bike Shop
Black celebrity has largely been placed at the vanguard of an imagined black achievement of affluence.
While many of the wealthiest black Americans derive their fortunes from some form of entertainment, they frequently are portrayed as major corporate owners, without ever making clear what their stake in percentage or control is in a given company.
Some of the celebrities actually have low stakes in their investment companies.
As an example, according to the Bloomberg article “Diageo Turns to Dutch, Diddy Partnerships for Vodka Expansion,” Sean Combs has been held out as an owner of Ciroq, but in actuality he is a profit participant whose main hand is in marketing, not in producing or financing the product.
Earvin “Magic” Johnson also admitted on “HBO Real Sports” that he has only invested $50 million dollars into the $2 billion dollar purchase of the MLB’s Los Angeles Dodgers, which according to Yahoo Sports works out to 2.3 percent of the team. Sean Carter (aka Jay-Z) with the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets, was reported to be part of 100 owners of the team at one point by Vox Media, leading to the creation of what some call the “Jay-Z rule” being adopted by the NBA board of governors, whereby a team can have no more than 25 owners, and each must invest enough to own at least 1 percent of the team. The necessity of adopting policies to eliminate the racial wealth gap becomes harder to establish, when a handful of African Americans are held out in media as evidence of significant black corporate power. When in fact, whatever power they possess is narrowly held and greatly circumscribed.
According to a Huffington Post article “Decadent Veil: Black America’s Wealth Illusion”, framed a picture of a black celebrity filled social veil that replaces a push for greater policy changes that address racial wealth disparities. Transformative social policies readily are pushed aside and replaced by what seems easier to attain: individualcelebrity status that is presented as a normal and accessible means of access to the “American Dream”, rather than a fantasy.
The vast majority (60 percent to 70 percent, depending on what definitions one chooses) of the top 0.1 percent of the income hierarchy in 2000– 2010 consists of top managers.
By comparison, athletes, actors, and artists of all kinds make up less than 5 percent of this group. In this sense, the new US inequality has much more to do with the advent of “super-managers” than with that of ‘superstars.’... The financial professions (including both managers of banks and other financial institutions and traders operating on the financial markets) are about twice as common in the very high income groups as in the economy overall (roughly 20 percent of the top 0.1 percent, whereas finance accounts for less than 10 percent of GDP).
This reflects a larger truth that the wealth held by those who control industry in America is far greater than the amounts found in any celebrity’s personal account, whether they are black or white. Therefore, a gap in wealth will not be closed through access to film, music, or sports careers. It is more likely to be found as being passed on through inheritance. Or in elite professions and wealth management for the rich, in the tiers of positions Piketty calls “super-managers” who receive “super-salaries.” In America these positions are overwhelmingly reserved for whites.
A Bloomberg Business News article titled “Black Executives are Losing Ground at Some Big Banks” noted
At JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the percentage of senior black executives and managers fell over the past five years, according to U.S. workforce data compiled by Bloomberg. They make up no more than 2.6 percent of top positions at the three banks, lower than across corporate America, where the percentage is slightly better and ticking up.
In addition, the absolute number of black CEOs of Fortune 500 companies has dwindled from eight in 2015 to four in 2017. And black Americans make up just 2.6 percent of those holding posts within striking distance of corporate chief executive suites to push toward closing the racial wealth gap, the veil of black celebrity must be pulled back enabling all Americans to understand there is no racial meritocracy in wealth, despite what is displayed on television networks from ESPN to BET.
Myth 12 Black family disorganization is a cause of the racial wealth gap?
Looking again at the typical American family, if there truly ever were one, is drastically changing. The number of two-parent households has fallen, and there is no longer one dominant type of family in the U.S.
The decline in children living in two-parent families has been offset by an almost threefold increase in those living with just one parent—typically the mother.
There are substantial differences in living arrangements of children by race and ethnicity. Most white (72 percent) and Asian-American (82 percent) children still are being raised by two married parents, as are 55 percent of Latino children. In sharp contrast, only 31percent of black children are living with two married parents, while more than half (54 percent) are being raised by a single-parent.
Evidence shows that growing up in a two-parent, married home results in significant benefits to children’s outcomes and life chances, including better physical and mental health, higher future wages and social ties, and college completion.
One explanation for the growing marriage gap between whites and blacks and the decline in two parent families among blacks is the shortage of marriageable black men.
The supply of marriageable black men – measured as the ratio of unmarried males in the labor force or in school to unmarried females – may help explain the rate of black single mother households and their reduced marriage opportunities.
Our research reveals that the rise in single motherhood is possibly driven by different mechanisms for blacks and whites.
The paucity of marriageable males in the black community may in part be due to higher rates of incarceration and early death.
On the other hand, white women have more plentiful options for marriage. There is statistical evidence that the greater lack of marriageable men is responsible for the persistence of never-married motherhood among black women.
The increasing rate of single parent households is often invoked to explain growing inequality, and the prevalence of black single motherhood is often seen as a driver of racial wealth inequities. These explanations tend to confuse consequence and cause and are largely driven by claims that if blacks change their behavior, they would see marked increases in wealth accumulation. This is a dangerous narrative that is steeped in racist stereotypes?
Single motherhood is a reflection of inequality, not a cause.
White women still have considerably more wealth than black women, regardless whether or not they are raising children. In fact, single white women with kids have the same amount of wealth as single black women without kids. Recent research also reveals that the median single-parent white family has more than twice the wealth of the median black or Latino family with two parents. These data points show that economic benefits that are typically associated with marriage will not close the racial wealth gap.
Having the “ideal” family type does not enable black households to substantially reduce the racial gap in wealth?
A prominent explanation for the decline in marriage among blacks and its negative consequences is that the decline is a culturally driven phenomenon.
For the last half century, many social scientists and policymakers have treated the causes of poverty as largely cultural, and they focused on single mother families as perpetuating a “culture of poverty.” The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, there is a conventional discourse that alleges self-detrimental behaviors stemming from legacies of discrimination and concentrations of poverty within the black community are the main cause for observed racial differences in quality and quantity of life.
Many have racialized and gendered poverty. In some peoples view, the persistence of poverty was due to the disproportionate presence of black families with female heads, leading, in turn, to the entrapment of black families in a notorious “tangle of pathology.” This long-standing narrative still permeates the national discourse on poverty and economic security, and it often has been used to advance the argument that black families are insufficiently disciplined and responsible to merit better economic conditions.
Explanations that focus on behavior and so-called cultural factors also miss the point that
retained wealth is a driving force for education, employment, and income outcomes.
Rather than simply being shaped by family structure, wealth actually shapes familystructure as well.
Social demographers point to the phenomenon of assortative mating, where persons of similar social status and resources tend to join as marital partners. The share of persons with higher education, higher levels of income and wealth who marry one another is on the rise.
Wealth inequality and insecurity cut across family types and most of the measurable inequality occurs within all demographic categories.
Both our nation’s underlying economic structures are supported by harmful narratives and unequal access to assets which begets unequal opportunities to preserve or increase wealth to be passed on to subsequent generations. It is time to move beyond these fallacies and confront the root causes of the racial wealth gap. Otherwise we will whistle in the wind, and the racial wealth gap will remain unchallenged?
SO the main driving force behind this Black Report is to expose hidden truths to address root causes of economic exclusion and racial inequity.
Black News aim to challenge current inequitable power structures so that black people can fully participate in both economies and have the freedom to bring their full selves to both diverse nations.
Report with Boris by Alton Anderson
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