Twitter and the Insidious Role of Institutional Racism and Exclusion in Social Media Companies in the United States

http://www.thenation.com/article/twitters-white-people-problem/

Twitter’s White-People Problem

Will the company become a leader in reforming its workforce, or a case study for how the tech industry’s relentless whiteness destroys innovation, too?

by Donovan X. Ramsey 

Twitter
January 6, 2016
The Nation

(Reuters / Kacper Pempel) 

DeRay McKesson joined Twitter in the spring of 2009 at the insistence of a friend who thought it would help him be more effective in his role as student government president at Bowdoin College. “She said that it was going to be the new wave of communicating with people,” says McKesson. His first tweet—like most of ours—was awkward, directed to a friend telling her she was “pretty great.”

Five years later, McKesson, with about 1,000 followers, was monitoring Twitter from his home in Minneapolis. He was rocked by the news of the killing of Mike Brown and outraged by the police force’s militarized response to protesters. He packed up his car and tweeted, “en route to Ferguson.”

Today, McKesson is a prominent activist in the Black Lives Matter movement, due in part to his adept use of Twitter to report live from the scene of protests and to communicate with media, his more than 272,000 followers, and even presidential candidates.

“I think Twitter is an incredible platform,” says McKesson. “I want to see it succeed.”

McKesson and other users of color have actually done quite a bit to help Twitter succeed. Over the past few years, the company has remained relevant thanks in part to Black Twitter, an informal network of black users whose interaction on the platform broke the news around Ferguson, has been credited with fueling the historic success of television shows like Scandal and Empire, and consistently injects jokes, grievances and issue campaigns from black America into mainstream media. Blacks and Latinos make up around 30 percent of Twitter’s active users, and a recent Pew poll found that both groups use the platform at higher rates than their white peers.

But while Twitter the platform is bustling with all types of racial diversity, Twitter the company is alarmingly white.

“The central issue is the tenacious myth that Silicon Valley and tech more broadly are perfect meritocracies.”

Twitter isn’t alone. Most of the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley are overwhelmingly white and male. While blacks and Latinos comprise 28 percent of the US workforce, they make up just 6 percent of Twitter’s total US workforce and six percent of Facebook employees. The number drops to five percent at Google. The statistics are startling considering the increasingly important role the technology sector plays in the American economy. Tech firms employed nearly six percent of private sector workers in 2014 and the industry is responsible for a little more than seven percent of the US GDP.

When diversity activists began campaigning a few years ago for tech companies to disclose their employee demographics, the truth was revealed. What resulted was a lot of handwringing over the state of diversity in tech and some commitment from companies, including Twitter to do better. Sadly, few companies have moved the needle. But for Twitter, that failure could be its undoing. Worse, for would-be tech workers, if a company with Twitter’s user profile can’t get diversity right, there’s little hope for the sector overall.

When Leslie Miley left his job at Twitter last year, the company’s number of black employees fell by two percent. That’s because Miley, as Twitter’s only black engineering manager, was one of just 49 black members of the company’s nearly 3,000-person US team. 

On his way out, Miley made it clear that the tech company’s resistance to cultivating a more diverse workforce, one representative of the country and its users, was indeed a major factor in his decision to leave. He refused a non-disclosure agreement, along with a sizable severance package, so he could speak out on the tech giant’s internal struggles with racial diversity. In a November post to Medium, Miley detailed his efforts to convince Twitter higher-ups to hire more black engineers, and the pushback he received.

Miley says hiring-committee meetings became contentious when he advocated for candidates of color. According to Miley, he and other members of Twitter’s black employee group, Blackbirds, were also kept out of meetings between the company’s executives and diversity advocates like Jesse Jackson and former NAACP head Ben Jealous. A particularly low point of his time at Twitter, Miley wrote, was during a conversation regarding diversity with Alex Roetter, Twitter’s senior vice president of engineering, in which Roetter allegedly told him, “Diversity is important, but we can’t lower the bar.” Roetter has since publicly apologized for the comment.

“Not only were we as a company not doing things about diversity, but the employees who did want to take a more active role were denied the resources to actually make anything happen,” says Mark Luckie, another black Twitter employee. Luckie, who worked for three years at Twitter as the manager of the journalism and media department, says he witnessed virtually no executive buy-in for diversity initiatives.

“A lot of the diversity initiatives—community service, guest speakers—originated from within the employee resource groups,” Luckie says. “In some cases, there was executive support, but not many of the initiatives came from the top down. To me, that sends a message to the company that diversity isn’t a priority.”

“I’ve learned that a person’s personal conviction doesn’t always translate to how they lead a company.”

Miley argues that the company’s homogeneity is stunting its growth. Twitter has a reported 320 million active users in comparison to Facebook’s 1.5 billion and Instagram’s over 400 million, and user growth at Twitter has been growing slowly. As a result, the company’s value has dropped from $31.4 billion in 2013 to about $20 billion currently. To reverse the trend, experts say Twitter needs to either find more users or increase engagement by the users it has now.

“Twitter is an excellent case of finding product-market fit, then losing it,” says Miley. “Twitter found it because it served a purpose, and it’s lost it, I think, because it doesn’t have diversity in who’s building the product. You end up with groupthink, where everybody is from the same background, thinks they’re brilliant and have roughly the same ideas.”

Miley was a part of a diverse team at Twitter that he says proves his point. His first project as the engineering manager was to fix Twitter’s “mute” option, a feature that allows users to filter from their timelines unwanted tweets, such as the kind of harassment and personal attacks that many prominent women have experienced on the platform.

“Twitter released a version in the past that did not go over well. They were so badly received by critics and the public that they had to be rolled back. No one wanted to touch the project,” says Miley. So he pulled together a team from across the organization, including women and people of color. “Who better to build the feature than people who often experience abuse online?” he asks. The result was a new “mute” option that was roundly praised as a major step by Twitter to address bullying and abuse.

Research supports the argument that diversity drives innovation. In fact, a study by the Center for Talent Innovation published in the Harvard Business Review found that employees of firms with diversity are 45 percent more likely to report a growth in market share over the previous year and 70 percent more likely to report that the firm captured a new market. Ironically, a 2015 study published by the MIT Sloan School of Management also found that ideas submitted by Twitter users with more diverse Twitter networks rated higher than those of users with more homogeneous followings.

To be sure, Twitter has been engaged in a lot of conversation around diversity, and some modest action. The company released its workforce representation statistics in 2014 in a blog post aptly titled, “Building a Twitter we can be proud of.” The post, by former Twitter Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion Janet Van Huysse, outlined the company’s efforts, which included recruiting at historically black colleges and universities and partnering with organizations that promote diversity in tech. Van Huysse’s 2015 follow-up post added actual diversity goals: increase “underrepresented minorities” to 11 percent of their overall US workforce; nine percent in tech roles and 6 percent in leadership roles.

Twitter executives were all unavailable for comment. A press representative did, however, offer a statement. “We’re committed to making substantive progress in making Twitter more diverse and inclusive,” it reads. “This commitment includes the expansion of our inclusion and diversity programs, diversity recruiting, employee development, and resource group-led initiatives.”

Related Articles:

Increasing Diversity in Tech Will Take a Lot More Than Promises
Bryce Covert
Twitter’s Blocking Flub Might Have Been Prevented If the Company Weren’t Dominated by Men

But many believe that the best chance for a change at Twitter is a change of leadership, in particular the return of its co-founder Jack Dorsey, who recently came back to the company to take the helm as CEO after being fired in 2008. It’s rumored that Dorsey is planning to retool Twitter with a focus on diversity all the way up to its eight-member board of directors, which happens to include just one woman and one person of color but six white men, three of whom are named Peter. More than anything, it’s Dorsey’s individual commitment to racial equity that gives some hope. “In my conversations with Jack, he comes across as authentic and authentically interested in Twitter’s black users,” says Miley.

“I met Jack on West Florissant last fall,” says DeRay McKesson of encountering the Twitter co-founder during the Ferguson protests. “In all of the conversations I’ve had with him, it’s been clear to me that he both understands issues of racial equity and justice and that he’s committed to acting on these issues.”

In November, after Miley’s departure, McKesson was invited to Twitter by Blackbirds. He joined the group for a lunch meeting. “It felt like family,“ he says. “In many of my conversations,” he adds, “people expressed their struggle with how the company has done some things, mixed with their faith in Jack now that he’s returned.”

After lunch, McKesson sat down for a Q and A session with Dorsey, which the BlackBirds also organized.

“I can’t explain it. But when I hear Jack talk about the platform, about the core of Twitter, it reminds me of why I love Twitter so much,” McKesson says. “This is more than a tool to him, there’s a magic in his voice when he talks about it. And I know that sounds cheesy, but it’s real.”

Twitter parted ways with Janet Van Huysse, its VP of diversity, after six years. She’s been replaced by a white man.

Not everyone is sold, though. When asked about the potential for a more diverse Twitter under Dorsey, Luckie says, “Maybe.” “It’s a weak ‘maybe,’” he adds. “I’ve learned that a person’s personal conviction doesn’t always translate to how they lead a company. So, we’ll just have to wait and see if Jack will be the savior of diversity at Twitter.”

Freada Kapor Klein has been working for many decades to increase diversity in corporate America. As the founder of the Level Playing Field Institute, she’s consulted throughout the tech industry. She has given presentations at Twitter on the topic of hidden bias and even attended some of the meetings to which Miley says he and the Blackbirds weren’t invited. “Let me just say, having done three talks there, I never met Dick Costolo,” says Kapor Klein of Twitter’s recently departed CEO. “I’ve also presented at Square, and Jack Dorsey not only attended, but he sat through the whole thing, in the first row and asked questions,” she says. “From everything I’ve heard about Jack and experienced, I think he’ll have a different stance.”

That stance, she explains, has to be rooted in an understanding that the challenge of diversifying a workforce does not typically reside in candidates and employees of color, but in the bias of those in charge. “The central issue to the lack of diversity in tech is the tenacious myth that Silicon Valley and tech more broadly are perfect meritocracies,” says Kapor Klein. “The implication of that is that there’s something wrong with African Americans, Latinos, and women from all backgrounds, as opposed to there being something deeply biased about tech.”

The data suggest she’s right. There are plenty of qualified candidates of color, despite assumptions that hiring them would mean “lowering the bar.” Eighteen percent of all computer-science graduates in 2012 were black or Latino, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Further, 11 percent of all recipients of bachelor’s degrees in computer science or computer engineering from prestigious research universities are black or Latino, according to data from the Computing Research Association. Still, those groups constitute, on average, just 5 percent of technology workers in Silicon Valley.

Kapor Klein, for one, says she’s cautiously optimistic that big tech companies like Twitter will make much-needed changes, but believes that ultimately most of the progress in the industry will come from start-ups and smaller, scrappier companies.

One company that has taken an aggressive approach to diversity is Pandora Media, the folks behind the music streaming service. The Oakland-based company valued at $4 billion puts up slightly more representative racial diversity numbers than Twitter, but leads the tech industry in gender diversity with a near 50-50 split between male and female staff.

“My approach to diversity is about cultivating mindsets within the company wherein diversity can be seen as an opportunity to be a much better business,” says Lisa Lee, Pandora’s senior diversity manager. “We are working for diversity in the company, not just because it’s a nice-to-have thing, but because it’s a part of what we have to do as a business if we want our product to actually reach everyone.”

Without some drastic intervention, it seems diversity will remain just a buzzword at companies like Twitter. When it comes down to brass tacks, the reality is that in order to make any significant strides in increasing the racial diversity of its workforce, Twitter would have to spend money to grow the staff, with a focus on hiring people of color, or let some of its white employees go. Neither of those options seems likely at this point.

At the end of the year, Twitter parted ways with Janet Van Huysse, its VP of diversity, after six years with the company.* She’s been replaced by Jeffrey Siminoff, a white man.

Correction: A previous version of this story stated incorrectly that Janet Van Huysee had been VP of diversity for six years. Rather, that is the term she had been at Twitter.

Donovan X. Ramsey is a multimedia journalist whose work puts an emphasis on race and class. Donovan has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Republic and GQ, among other outlets. He's currently a Demos Emerging Voices Fellow.

When Is President Obama Going To Address the Specific Needs and Aspirations Of Black America?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/18/obama-black-america_n_2499138.html

All,

This particular "chickens come home to roost" historical moment was-- as anyone who has been paying any attention at all to the actual political, economic, and cultural realities of this society-- absolutely inevitable.  In fact, it is a measure of just how strangely and tragically successful President Obama, his administration, and the Democratic Party generally have been in systematically ignoring, dismissing, and repressing any and all fundamental public criticism of his domestic policies and programs in general--and especially as they pertain to the national African American and Latino American communities. This also goes for all vestiges of critical grassroots political leadership coming out of these major "minority" constituent groups that aside from a few largely marginal media imposed exceptions (like the often valid but unjustly villified critiques of Cornel West) have also been subjected  to the egregious neglect that has been occurring since day one of Obama's presidency.  What ironically makes this ongoing problem even worse politically is that it would have been virtually IMPOSSIBLE for the President to have won the national election in 2008 and especially re-election in 2012 without the large concentrated voting power of this groundbreaking coalition of black and brown voters--a powerful coalition that between them gave the President a whopping 84% of its national vote (with blacks voting in favor of Obama by a margin of 94%!) or nearly 30 million of his final total of 65 million votes.  Keep in mind in this crucial context that Obama lost the national white vote by a LANDSLIDE in both 2008 against McCain/Palin, where Obama received only 43% of white votes nationwide and even less (a feeble 39%!) to Romney/Ryan in 2012.  What's so important about the following article and so much ekse that has been written since the president's second term inauguration last monday is that for the first time since Obama became President in 2008 a broad based coalition of moderate black civil rights organizations who heretofore have been nothing but passively uncritical lapdogs, flacks, hacks, and official mouthpieces for the President (a long largely opportunist list that now includes everyone from the Rev. Al Sharpton and Toure to Michael Eric Dyson, Ben Jealous, and Melissa Harris-Perry, among others) in these communities of color are finally making some real noise like some outspoken activists of the black and Latino left have been since the President's first inauguration four years ago. It will be very interesting indeed to see if this very necessary critique and public rhetoric of discontent and disappointment will actually lead to any broader and far more progressive alternatives in terms of structural analysis and most importantly policy decisions on behalf of the masses of poor, working, and middle class African American citizens.  Stay tuned...

Kofi

Obama Needs A Plan To Help Black America, Say Activists, Economists 

01/18/2013
Huffington Post


WASHINGTON -- Less than a month after President Barack Obama won his second term, the National Urban League summoned Bernard Anderson to a meeting in the capital.

The invitation was no surprise. Anderson is a giant: an economist and prominent author, the first African American granted tenure at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, a former assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Labor and chair of the National Urban League's Council of Economic Advisers.

The real surprise was the meeting agenda: not to celebrate Obama's historic victory, but to develop a strategy forcing him to pay more attention to Black America.

Anderson was one of more than 40 civil rights, social justice, health care, business and community development leaders in attendance. And at that Dec. 3 gathering just across Lafayette Square from the White House, no single issue occupied more time or generated more discussion than Anderson's report on the fragile economic status of black Americans.

"What happened in that room is indicative of what so many of us, including the president and I know his wife, have known and felt for some time," Anderson told The Huffington Post. "It would not bother me if he never made another speech before the Urban League or the NAACP. What he needs to do is use his office, the bully pulpit and actual policy to address the persistence of racial inequality in economic life. If he does that, then I think his presidency will be redeemed."

That redemption may be a long time in coming. The White House declined to make available an official to speak on the record about a specific new agenda -- or lack of one -- to deal with life in Black America. On background, a senior White House official cited support for measures such as extended unemployment insurance and new financial regulations, but suggested that political and budget constraints make sweeping new initiatives unlikely.

The Black America that views Obama as its president, that helped to make him America's president, has a list of critical concerns and priorities -- many of which are shared with the nation's fast-growing Latino population. Together, these are the people who are struggling hardest to make ends meet, whose grasp on a stable middle-class life remains the most tenuous and to whom the economic recovery has been the least kind.


As Obama prepares for his second inauguration, civil and labor rights leaders, economists, political scientists, social critics, leading thinkers, researchers and observers want the president to acknowledge this more openly. And they want that acknowledgement to come through policy and deeds, not speeches and spin.

Obama's presence in the White House, path-breaking and historic as it is, hardly means that race no longer matters in America, these experts say. Ironically, his ascendance may have promoted the palliative idea that the wounds of racial inequality have been healed, when some matters have actually grown worse.

Even a cursory list reveals troubling facts: Blacks and Latinos disproportionately attend subpar schools, are taught by the least-qualified teachers, face sky-high incarceration rates and suffer from low levels of health care coverage.

"Voting, health care and criminal justice were all on the agenda," said Anderson, about the summit. "But the disparities in income, employment and wealth are so pervasive, so long-standing that there were people in that room who rarely write the word 'economics' raising their hands."

Without a doubt, the problem predates Obama.

For 34 of the last 39 years, annual average black unemployment, a measure of those actively looking for work but unable to find it, has sat at or above 11 percent, according to federal data. And black wealth -- the cash and other assets that families have to see them through a crisis after accounting for their debt -- dropped a collective 53 percent between 2000 and 2007.

But the Great Recession has brought more trouble.

The foreclosure crisis (along with a 14 percent black unemployment rate) has helped to push a disproportionate number of black homeowners out of their neighborhoods and out of the middle class. By 2010, a full 35 percent of black homeowners -- and 41 percent of Latino homeowners -- reported they were underwater, meaning they owed banks or mortgage lenders more than their homes were worth, according to a Pew Research Center survey. Just 18 percent of whites said they were in the same situation.

Even more troubling, over 25 percent of black Americans were living in poverty as of 2011 -- 10.9 million people, up slightly from 10.7 million the year before, according to the most recent Census data.

Algernon Austin, a labor sociologist and researcher at the Economic Policy Institute, said these problems have been exacerbated by the failure of policymakers to accept that inequalities in the education system and the labor market continue to exist. The perpetuation of stereotypes, the more intense policing of black communities, and other biases within the criminal justice system have produced disproportionate levels of incarceration in Black America and rendered a large share of the black male population unable to qualify for affordable housing or federal college aid or to find work due to criminal convictions, Austin said.

"What's happened for too long is that people see the criminal offending and say that's bad culture, bad behavior, and therefore Black America's economic problems are really a cultural problem," said Austin. "I am saying if we really want to address crime, poverty, and inequality, then we have to see them as interrelated problems, and the the place to start is jobs."

For Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League and former mayor of New Orleans, the implication is clear: Black America played a critical role in helping to reelect Obama. Now that the worst of the nation's financial crisis is over, there are social and political obligations that must be met. They exist not because Obama shares a phenotype or genetic heritage with Black America, but because Black America is American, he said.

"A coalition of women, young voters and people of color -- blacks, Latinos and Asians -- put this man back in office," said Morial. "We were with him in the sense that the first term was about putting out fires and addressing emergencies. We understand the legislative climate. We know what the stimulus did and how hard he had to fight for that. But four years later, so much of the recovery has bypassed people of color and middle-class America that we are not going to let the counsel of cynics dissuade us or stop us from making demands and getting some tangible, sustainable progress. The silent tiger is going to roar and roar and roar."

As the nation's first black president, Obama must solve a complicated political calculus, said Cornell Belcher, president of Brilliant Corners, a political strategy firm that was deeply involved in Obama's campaigns.

He cannot appear to favor black America, nor can he appear completely disconnected from it, Belcher said. He cannot appear weak, but must also avoid embodying stereotypes such as the angry or dangerous black man. And on the rare occasions that Obama has hinted at or explicitly expressed the way that race continues to shape experience in America, he has had to steady himself against withering charges of racism, communism and worse, Belcher said.

"There has to be a maturity about how politics works," said Belcher. "There's no doubt that the president is constrained in some ways. However, as an interest group, should leaders of black organizations make the case for what their communities need? Absolutely. If they don't, who will?"

Even if the country and the second Obama administration still clings to a "rising tide lifts all boats" approach to policy, Black America's economic situation has grown so dire, along with that of the Latino population, that any policy that fails to target these groups' challenges will likely fail to resolve the nation's biggest problems, Austin said.

For instance, the administration's willingness to limit cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients will have a far greater impact on black and Latino senior citizens, boosting poverty. After a lifetime of what are often lower wages, higher-cost borrowing and a limited ability to save, 26 percent of black seniors and 25 percent of Latino seniors depend on Social Security for 100 percent of their income, compared to about 14 percent of white retirees, a December 2012 Economic Policy Institute analysis found.

"We simply have to start having more sophisticated policy conversations," said Austin, "even if they make some of us uncomfortable."

A White House official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the Obama administration is deeply concerned about Black America's economic condition. The official touted the fact that the administration used billions of dollars in stimulus funds to save or create an estimated 682,000 jobs, the vast majority of which were in local, state or federal government agencies -- the single largest employer of black men and the second most common for black women.

The White House also pointed out that the administration has cracked down on employers that use discriminatory hiring practices and on banks that engage in discriminatory lending. The Justice Department has funded programs that seek to reduce the number of people who return to prison, worked to trim sentencing disparities, and defended the rights of blacks and Latinos to participate fully in the political process. And the administration's crowning achievement, the Affordable Care Act, is expected to help millions of black Americans gain health insurance.

"I think we have at least tried to push forward legislation that would support and address the economic needs of the African-American community," the White House official said. "Realistically, as a country, we are in a place where we can't afford everything we want, and a lot of stuff that we have been trying to push through Congress has been stonewalled."

The White House did not offer much in the way of specific policies the administration is planning to help Black America in the second term, choosing instead to highlight big-ticket items like rebuilding the economy, expanding domestic manufacturing, pursuing immigration reform and developing the green energy industry.

"An economy that continues to improve is going to benefit everyone, African Americans included," the staffer said. "That's not just a catch phrase. That's true. Are we where we want to be? No. Are things getting better for most Americans? Yes."

The question, though, is not about the "most" but the "rest." That's why Anderson and others like him came to Washington in December, and why they will be watching the second term so closely.

This article is part of a series produced by The Huffington Post that closely examines the most pressing challenges facing President Obama in his second term. To read other posts in the series, click here.

Read more from Huffington Post bloggers:

Benjamin Todd Jealous: 'Employment Discrimination 2.0' and What President Obama Can Do About It in His Second Term

As a candidate Obama promised to focus on jobs. In direct contrast to his opponent, he pledged to lift all boats -- especially those boats that had gotten stuck in the mud. Now that he is about to begin his second term, the black community is watching to see how he will follow through.

Gregory D. Squires: What Does Barack Obama Owe the Black Community?

Obama owes quite a bit to the black community, but not because of the vote, his color or even the presumably more liberal politics of his Democratic Party but because the federal government, among others, has an obligation to address the continuing significance of race in America.

Dr. Boyce Watkins: How Black America Grew as a Result of the Obama Presidency

Millions of black folks were watching the throne when Obama was sworn in and gladly putting his picture right next to Martin Luther King and Jesus. But the Obama presidency has served as a marvelous and intriguing political education for the African American community.

Structural Racism and the Ongoing Financial War On African American Consumers

Josh Anderson for The New York Times
Henry E. Hildebrand III, a Chapter 13 trustee in Nashville, says the system needs to be changed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/business/blacks-face-bias-in-bankruptcy-study-suggests.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2

"Who are we? Where are we going? What are we here for?"

--Amus Mor "Poem to the Hip Generation"

All,

A series of (rhetorical) questions: What does this article tell you about the vicious reality of blatant institutional racism and class exploitation in America today? What does this tell you about the doctrines of white supremacy and capitalist hegemony in this country and its ongoing venal power in the 21st century? What does this tell you about the dire absence of any effective national grassroots political strategy and visionary radical leadership among African Americans to directly combat this massive problem? What does this tell you about the bizarre complicity and utterly passive-aggressive "contentment" of so many black citizens (as well as all other Americans!) with an economic system in which well over 20% of the national black adult population is currently unemployed (the highest rate since the Great Depression of the 1930s!)? Why do we continue-- despite all our isolated verbal complaints to the contrary--to fatalistically put up with a supine Presidency, an obstructionist Congress, and the withering indifference of BOTH national political parties that categorically REFUSES to do anything substantive about an explosive increase in poverty in the United Hates generally over the past 30 years (and especially over the past decade)? Why do we keep pretending that it's "all gonna get better eventually" simply if we elect the "right man" for President in 2012? How many more of us will have to lose our jobs, our homes, our savings, our pensions, our rights, and our lives before we make up our collective mind to actively DO something about this relentless crisis?

Finally: What is to be done? And who's gonna do it?...

Kofi


Blacks Face Bias in Bankruptcy, Study Suggests
By TARA SIEGEL BERNARD
January 20, 2012
New York Times

Blacks are about twice as likely as whites to wind up in the more onerous and costly form of consumer bankruptcy as they try to dig out from their debts, a new study has found.

The disparity persisted even when the researchers adjusted for income, homeownership, assets and education. The evidence suggested that lawyers were disproportionately steering blacks into a process that was not as good for them financially, in part because of biases, whether conscious or unconscious.

The vast majority of debtors file under Chapter 7 of the bankruptcy code, which typically allows them to erase most debts in a matter of months. It tends to have a higher success rate and is less expensive than the alternative, Chapter 13, which requires debtors to dedicate their disposable income to paying back their debts for several years.

The study of racial differences in bankruptcy filings was written by Robert M. Lawless, a bankruptcy expert and law professor, and Dov Cohen, a psychology professor, both with the University of Illinois; and Jean Braucher, a law professor at the University of Arizona.

A survey conducted as part of their research found that bankruptcy lawyers were much more likely to steer black debtors into a Chapter 13 than white filers even when they had identical financial situations. The lawyers, the survey found, were also more likely to view blacks as having “good values” when they expressed a preference for Chapter 13.

“Unfortunately I’m not surprised with these results,” said Neil Ellington, executive vice president of Consumer Education Services, a credit counseling agency in Raleigh, N.C. “The same underlying issues that created the problem in mortgage lending, with minorities paying higher interest rates than their white counterparts having the same loan qualifications, are present in all financial fields.”

The findings, which will be published in The Journal of Empirical Legal Studies later this year, did not suggest that there was any obvious evidence of discrimination in the bankruptcy process. “I don’t think there is any overt conspiracy,” Professor Lawless said. “But when you have a complex system, these biases can play out and the people within the system don’t see the pattern because nobody is in charge of looking at these big issues.”

Changes in the bankruptcy law in 2005 were intended to force more debtors to file under Chapter 13 and repay some of their debts, but that has not been the effect. In fact, the rate of Chapter 13 filings has remained relatively steady, at about 30 percent. Last year, overall bankruptcy filings were 1.4 million.

Chapter 13 is not always an inferior choice. Many distressed borrowers go that route because they may be able to save their homes from foreclosure. But even that does not explain away the difference: among blacks who did not own their homes, the rate of filing for Chapter 13 was still twice as high as the rate for other races. And the trend persists across the country, beyond regions like the South where Chapter 13 tends to be a more popular option among all debtors (perhaps, in part, because Chapter 13 originated in the South).

If a debtor chooses an inappropriate chapter, there can be serious implications. Chapter 13 plans, for instance, are more likely to fail than a Chapter 7. Nearly two of every three Chapter 13 plans are not completed, which means the filers’ remaining debts are not discharged, leaving them right where they started. One bankruptcy judge, who sees filers once they can no longer make the required payments in the plans, said the debtors usually do not have enough income to stick with the budget.

“They thought they could cut back on this or that, and you might be able to do that for three or four months,” said the judge, C. Ray Mullins, chief judge for the United States Bankruptcy Court in the Northern District of Georgia. “But in a Chapter 13, it will be either three or five years. There are certain things you can’t anticipate — a spike in gas prices.”

The study has two parts. One used data from actual bankruptcy cases from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, the most detailed trove of information on filers currently available. The project surveyed 2,400 households nationwide who filed for bankruptcy in 2007.

Results from the second part of the study, which illustrated the lawyer’s influence in determining which bankruptcy chapter to choose, came from a survey sent to lawyers asking them questions based on fictitious couples who were seeking bankruptcy protection. When the couple was named “Reggie and Latisha,” who attended an African Methodist Episcopal Church — as opposed to a white couple, “Todd and Allison,” who were members of a United Methodist Church — the lawyers were more likely to recommend a Chapter 13, even though the two couples’ financial circumstances were identical.

Even though the attorneys’ fees for the more labor-intensive Chapter 13 are more than double the charge for a Chapter 7, some truly distressed debtors will pursue a Chapter 13 anyway, several bankruptcy experts said. That is because they can pay the fee over time, unlike in a Chapter 7, which typically requires a payment before the case is filed. If blacks are perceived as less likely to have the resources — or a family with resources — to come up with a lump sum, some lawyers may be inclined to suggest a Chapter 13, these experts suggested.

But Professor Lawless said he and the other researchers accounted for this possibility in their results. As to the possibility that unscrupulous attorneys could push Chapter 13 filings in an attempt to get higher fees, Professor Lawless said that effect should be apparent across all races.

He said the study has no information about whether other players in the process — judges and bankruptcy trustees, among others — were contributing to the difference in filings rates.

William E. Brewer Jr., president of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys, and a practicing lawyer in Raleigh, N.C., disputed the premise of the study that Chapter 13 was always more burdensome and always required debtors to pay more to their creditors. “The study does not adequately control for the numerous complex factors that dictate chapter choice,” he said. “Having said this, Nacba intends to present the study to its members for discussion and self-reflection.”

Other, more limited studies have also shown the higher incidence of Chapter 13 among blacks. In Chicago, the Woodstock Institute, a research and policy group, reported last May that in mostly black communities in Cook County, nearly half the cases from 2006 to 2010 were filed under Chapter 13, compared with 32.8 percent of all cases filed in the county. “For people of color, who historically have fewer assets, preservation of assets is a top priority,” said Tom Feltner, vice president at Woodstock, who added that lawyers often have a financial incentive to push Chapter 13 filings. “It is possible that the higher levels of Chapter 13 in communities of color can be explained by a combination of higher attorney’s fees and a filer’s desire, or advice that elevates a filer’s desire, to preserve as many assets as possible.”

Henry E. Hildebrand III, who has served as a Chapter 13 trustee in Tennessee for 30 years, said he had noticed that blacks and other minorities appeared to be overrepresented in Chapter 13 cases. “We should focus not on picking apart the conclusions,” Mr. Hildebrand said, “but use this study as an indication that we should be attempting to fix what has become a complex, expensive, unproductive system.”

We Must Continue to Confront the 21st Century Realities of Race and Class in the 'Age of Obama'

'Let me hear you say 'black', Maxine Waters said. | AP Photo

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/61912.html


All,

YES!!! Now we're talking! I knew I could ultimately count on Representative Maxine Waters and other responsible and genuinely concerned liberal/progressive black politicians and activists to finally confront the President on the vital question of the ugly crisis of national black unemployment and the massive racist campaign against African Americans generally led by the Tea Party and the Republican right. FINALLY someone in the Democratic Party is trying to hold Obama ACCOUNTABLE for addressing crucial issues that should have been seriously addressed from Day One of the Obama Administration. IT'S ABOUT DAMN TIME!! I was beginning to think that large numbers of black folks had simply lost their minds and their common sense as well and were stumbling around in some fantasy ridden dreamlike state merely because the President is black. As millions of other progressive black, white, Latino, and Asian Americans (who BTW--we should never forget-- actually supported and VOTED FOR the President in 2008!) have been saying for nearly three years now: WE MUST ALL FIGHT FOR A TRULY PROGRESSIVE AGENDA ACROSS THE BOARD AND STAND UP AND DEFEAT OUR BRAZEN RACIST RIGHTWING ENEMIES IN THE NATIONAL POLITICAL SPHERE AS WELL AS IN OUR EVERYDAY LIVES. Time is running out and we CAN'T WAIT any longer. When the President makes his highly anticipated speech about a national jobs bill after Labor Day he had better come clean no matter what the Republicans and the Tea Party think and no matter what kind of intolerant political bullying and pathological lying they will most certainly attempt to engage in. HE AND WE MUST STAND UP AND TELL THEM AS MAXINE SAID TO "GO STRAIGHT TO HELL!" The needs, desires, and aspirations of all poor, working, and middle class American citizens who comprise the great majority of the country (and that most emphatically INCLUDES BLACK PEOPLE) must be attended to first and foremost and if the reactionary wealthy oppose us we must do everything in our massive collective power to push them aside as well. As always what we most need to know is this: WHOSE SIDE IS THE PRESIDENT ON? Only he and he alone can answer that paramount question but it had better be the RIGHT ANSWER...The stakes are far too high for anymore rhetorical bullshit coming from either the White House OR Congress...Time for us all to "get busy or get lost"...

Kofi


Waters to Obama aide: Say 'black'
By: Jennifer Epstein
August 23, 2011

Rep. Maxine Waters and other black leaders lobbed heated questions at one of President Barack Obama’s top jobs advisers Monday, pressing him to confirm the White House is focusing on creating jobs in struggling African-American communities — and to say the word “black.”

Don Graves, the executive director of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, said at a nighttime forum at a black church in Miami that the president is “focused on every community across the country,” The Miami Herald reported.

But when he added that “certain communities have been hit harder than other communities,” Waters pushed him. “Let me hear you say ‘black,’” the California Democrat said.

As the crowd cheered, The Washington Post said in its report on the Congressional Black Caucus-sponsored event, Graves quietly said: “black, African-American, Latino — we’re going to focus on getting people back to work.”

The approach that assisting all communities helps African-Americans get jobs is “a bunch of bull,” Rep. Laura Richardson (D-Calif.) said, according to the Post. Later, she asked Graves whether he would help shuttle dozens of pieces of jobs legislation authored by CBC members to the president so he could enact them using executive authority.

“You all don’t need to go through me to get to the president,” Graves said.

But Richardson disagreed. “Let’s be honest. We have met with the president. We are asking you in the capacity of your position [at the council on] jobs, are you willing to review our bills, to work with us?”

“You may not feel like the president is listening to you, but he hears you loud and clear,” Graves said, referring to the growing frustration from African-Americans that was on view last week as Waters spoke at a much-covered CBC town hall in Detroit.

Graves said that one obstacle to job creation are “folks who are going to stand in the way and block the legislation that the Congressional Black Caucus has proposed.”

Waters interrupted him. “What people are you talking about?” she said, according to the Herald. “Say tea party. Say it!”

Graves did, though the Post described him as doing so “reluctantly.” “It was tea party Republicans,” he said.

Waters hasn’t been shy about her criticism of the tea party movement. At the event over the weekend, after being attacked by tea party-affiliated Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) as an “overseer” of the “21st century plantation” of blacks in the Democratic Party, Waters said “the tea party can go straight to hell.”

The day after West criticized Waters and other black Democrats, his younger brother was at a job fair that Waters and other CBC members had organized in Atlanta. (West is the only Republican member of the CBC.)

But Waters wasn’t the only person on the dais Monday night who was attacking the tea party movement. Rev. Jesse Jackson, who West also described as an “overseer” said that the movement should be called the “Fort Sumter tea party that sought to maintain states’ rights and slavery,” the Herald reported.

“The tea party is a new name on an old game,” he said. “Dr. King fought a ‘tea party’ in Alabama. … He had no weapons, but he confronted the tea party.”



© 2011 POLITICO LLC

http://www.politico.com/politico44/perm/0811/sermon_on_the_green_17a363d0-4817-479e-8b75-d72de47387f8.html

Freeman to POTUS: 'Get pissed off'
By GLENN THRUSH
08/22/11
POLITICO 44

'If I could vote for him 1,000 times, I would,' Freeman said of Obama. AP Photo

When President Obama jumped on the back nine of the celebrity-clogged Vineyard Golf Club course on Sunday, he ran into none other than Morgan Freeman, Oscar winner and Obama backer.

Freeman, it turns out, was as free with advice for Obama as he was for Tim Robbins in “The Shawshank Redemption.” (POLITICO was holding outside the course in the pool van, told only that Obama was playing with his usual island foursome.)

But the deeply wired Boston Globe, invaluable for Vineyard gossip, caught up with Freeman at an event later in the day.

“What I wanted to tell him is to get pissed off, get fighting mad,” the actor told the paper. “But I know he won’t because he doesn’t think it’s politically smart.”

On Obama’s chances for reelection, Freeman added, “If I could vote for him 1,000 times, I would.”

“I think he’s been horribly sandbagged, and it makes me so angry,” he said.

The Dangerous Persistence and Expansion of Racial Disparities, and Institutional Racism in the U.S. Economy

http://www.truth-out.org/racial-wealth-gaps-larger-ever-heres-how-it-will-destroy-us/1311953589


The Racial Wealth Gap's Larger Than Ever--Here's How It Will Destroy Us
by Kai Wright
29 July 2011
ColorLines | Op-Ed

This morning features two large and frustrating pieces of economic news. One: Washington's silly fight over a fake debt crisis (rather than the real debt crisis [4]) isn't likely to resolve itself in time to avoid a manufactured catastrophe. Two: When measured by wealth, racial inequality in the US is greater than it's been since 1984. Anybody truly concerned about the country's future solvency should be most alarmed by the latter news.

The racial wealth gap has been enormous ever since the Census Bureau began measuring it 25 years ago. But it has never been larger than today. The median wealth of a white family is now at least 20 times higher than that of a black family and 18 times that of a Latino family, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center [5].

Pew looked at wealth numbers between 2005 and the technical end of the US recession in 2009. It found that the racial wealth gap exploded in that time period, as blacks and Latinos suffered dramatic blows from the collapsed housing market. Median wealth—the net value of your assets versus your debts—fell by 66 percent among Latino households and 53 percent among black households, while it fell just 16 percent among white households. By 2009, median black and Latino families each held less than $7,000 in wealth; the median white family held $113,149.

That's a lot of numbers. But they all add up to something quite simple: When the economy struggles, those who are least secure get crushed. That's nothing new, and neither is Washington's refusal to deal with it. With the exception of the aggressive efforts to create a white middle class following World War II, US economic policy has never encouraged economic equality. What's new today is how much economic policy actually facilitates inequality.

Certainly the recent explosion in the wealth gap is owing to the fact that the little wealth black and Latino families hold is disproportionately locked up in homes. White families are far more likely to have jobs with retirement accounts and investments in the stock market. Those black and Latino families that have wealth depend on the housing market for it.

But that's still more symptom than root cause. Black and Latino families are also far more likely to live in places crawling with expensive, deceptive consumer lending [6] of all sorts, from car loans to refinance mortgages. They are more likely to turn to that lending because they make less money and because they already hold less wealth to cushion themselves in tough times. It's an ugly cycle: inequality across the economy creates demand for predatory credit to bridge the gap, which in turn worsens inequality.

So things are right now growing dire in communities of color—with home wealth evaporating, joblessness lingering and wages falling [7], people have never been more vulnerable to predation. That's a problem for people of color, yes, but it's also a problem for the entire economy. After all, we already know what happens when we leave huge segments of our economy open to predatory credit—see under: subprime mortgages and global economic collapse. And with blacks and Latinos already accounting for roughly a third of the people whose labor and spending create the economy—a share that will increase dramatically in the next generation—this sort of deep inequality is simply untenable.

Which means today's Pew study is more of a benchmark than a final tally of the damage done in the past decade. Unless Washington intervenes to get people living-wage jobs and stop banks from preying on their wages with deceptive products, these numbers will grow more dramatic. That's a problem for everyone.


Kai Wright [9]


Links:

[1] http://www.truth-out.org/print/4597
[2] http://www.truth-out.org/printmail/4597
[3] http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/07/wealth_gap_explosion.html
[4] http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/07/its_time_to_lift_the_debt_burden_wall_street_loaded_onto_our_backs.html
[5] http://pewsocialtrends.org/2011/07/26/wealth-gaps-rise-to-record-highs-between-whites-blacks-hispanics/
[6] http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/04/a_swamp_of_predatory_lending_is_drowning_black_and_brown_neighborhoods.html
[7] http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/07/nightmare_on_main_street_strikes_again.html
[8] http://www.truth-out.org/printmail
[9] http://www.truth-out.org/kai-wright/1304430918
[10] http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/6694/p/salsa/web/common/public/signup?signup_page_KEY=2160
[11] https://members.truth-out.org/donate

PEW Research Center Report Reveals the Grave Impact of the National Recession On the Massive Expansion of Racial Disparities in U.S. Wealth

http://www.xydo.com/toolbar/25075980-study_shows_racial_wealth_gap_grows_wider

"The study, which used data collected by the Census Bureau, found that the median wealth of Hispanic households fell by 66 percent from 2005 to 2009. By contrast, the median wealth of whites fell by just 16 percent over the same period. African Americans saw their wealth drop by 53 percent. Asians also saw a big decline, with household wealth dropping 54 percent.

The declines have led to the largest wealth disparities in the 25 years that the bureau has been collecting the data, according to the report.

Median wealth of whites is now 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households, double the already marked disparities that had prevailed in the decades before the recent recession, the study found.

“It’s a very stark reminder of the high share of minorities who live at the economic margins of this country,” said Paul Taylor, executive vice president of the Pew Research Center and an author of the report. “These data really show their economic vulnerability.”

Study Shows Racial Wealth Gap Grows Wider
by PAM FESSLER
July 26, 2011

There's long been a big gap between the wealth of white families and the wealth of African-Americans and Hispanics. But the Great Recession has made it much worse — the divide is almost twice what it used to be.

That's according to a new study by the Pew Research Center, which says that the decline in the housing market is the main cause.

The numbers are astounding. The median wealth of a white family in 2009 was 20 times greater than that of the average black family, and 18 times greater than the average Hispanic family. In other words, the average white family had $113,149 in net worth, compared to $6,325 for Hispanics and $5,677 for blacks.

That's the largest gap since the government began collecting the data a quarter of a century ago, and twice what it was before the start of the Great Recession.

Real Estate Downturn

Rakesh Kochhar, one of the authors of the report, says white households went into the recession in a much stronger position and, as a result, were better able to weather the storm.

One reason was investment in real estate. Minority families had most of their wealth in their homes, so when the housing bubble burst, Kochhar says, those households took a bigger hit.

"Especially Hispanics, for example. Sixty-six percent of their net worth derives from home equity," Kochhar says. "And they are concentrated geographically in parts of the country such as California, Arizona, Florida and Nevada, where the housing downturn was most severe."

The result is that the average Hispanic family lost two-thirds of its wealth between 2005 and 2009, according to the Pew report. Black families lost more than half of theirs.

White households, on the other hand, were more diversified. They had a greater share of their money in stocks, mutual funds and pensions. They lost wealth, but only about 16 percent on average.

Lingering Effects Of The Recession

But there were other factors at work, too.

Take Helena Edwards of San Francisco. Two years ago, she found herself, her partner and three children facing eviction from an apartment. Their landlord had foreclosed on the property, but didn't tell them. Edwards, who is African-American, was able to eventually buy a home with the help of a nonprofit group called EARN, which promotes savings by low-income families.

But she says it's not easy balancing all of her bills. Her partner lost his job, and she had her pay and health benefits cut back because of the economic downturn.

"Am I able to save $5 a month? Not really no more. Do I still live paycheck to paycheck with the house? I still live paycheck to paycheck with the house," Edwards says.

Kochhar says Hispanics and African-Americans are far more likely to be unemployed because of the recession, and that has put an additional strain on assets. It means tapping into savings and pension funds, or going into debt just to make ends meet.

As a result, about a third of black and Hispanic households had zero or negative net worth at the end of the recession in 2009. That's twice the level of white families.

Tom Shapiro of Brandeis University, who has studied the racial wealth gap for years, says he's concerned about the long-term impact. He thinks the wealth gap will likely grow even more, unless the economy turns around soon.

"If a family doesn't have enough for a safety net for itself, it can't think about moving forward or moving ahead," he says.

That means fewer resources for things like education or buying a house or starting a business. Shapiro says that only puts the average minority family further behind, and less able to weather the next economic storm.

It's a cycle Edwards hopes to break by scraping together the money for her mortgage payments. She wants to pass her house on to her daughter, so her daughter has the head start Edwards never had.

http://pewhispanic.org/reports/report.php?ReportID=145

All,

Don't look now but the already horrific economic reality is actually FAR WORSE than anything that has been generally reported on over the past three years...A devastating and very depressing confirmation of Maxim One of "Natambu's Law" ("No matter how bad things are or appear to be at any given time one can rest assured that upon further investigation the actual reality is far worse than anything one could possibly imagine." )

Kofi


7.26.2011

The Toll of the Great Recession

Hispanic Household Wealth Fell by 66% from 2005 to 2009


Median household wealth among Hispanics fell from $18,359 in 2005 to $6,325 in 2009. The percentage drop—66%—was the largest among all racial and ethnic groups, according to a new report by the Pew Research Center's Social & Demographic Trends project. During the same period, median household wealth declined 53% among black households and 16% among white households.

The Pew Research report provides the first look at how the Great Recession impacted household wealth. It finds that plummeting house values were the principal cause of the erosion in wealth among all groups. However, because Hispanics derived nearly two-thirds of their net worth in 2005 from home equity and a disproportionate share reside in states that were in the vanguard of the housing meltdown, Hispanics were hit hardest by the housing market downturn.

The Pew Research analysis also finds that the median wealth of white households is 18 times that of Hispanic households and 20 times that of black households. These lopsided wealth ratios are the largest in the quarter century since the government first published such data, and roughly twice the size of the ratios that had prevailed between these three groups for the two decades prior to the Great Recession.

These findings are based on a Pew Research Center analysis of newly-available data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), an economic questionnaire distributed periodically to tens of thousands of households by the U.S. Census Bureau. It is considered the most comprehensive source of data about household wealth in the United States by race and ethnicity.

Among the report's other key findings:

About a third of Hispanic (31%) and black (35%) households had zero or negative net worth in 2009, compared with 15% of white households. In 2005, the comparable shares had been 23% for Hispanics, 29% for blacks and 11% for whites.

About a quarter of all Hispanic (24%) and black (24%) households in 2009 had no assets other than a vehicle, compared with just 6% of white households. These percentages are little changed from 2005.

During the period under study, wealth disparities also increased within the Hispanic community. The top 10% of Hispanic households saw their share of all Hispanic household wealth rise from 56% in 2005 to 72% in 2009.

The report, "Twenty to One: Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks and Hispanics," is available on the Pew Social & Demographic Trends website.

Vanessa Vick for the New York Times

A taco restaurant owned by Armando Moya, a Mexican immigrant, in Woodbridge, Va., outside Washington. He opened it in 2005, the same year he bought a house, which he has had to sell.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/us/26hispanics.html

Recession Study Finds Hispanics Hit the Hardest
By Sabrina Tavernise
New York Times

WOODBRIDGE, Va. — Hispanic families accounted for the largest single decline in wealth of any ethnic and racial group in the country during the recession, according to a study published Tuesday by the Pew Research Center.

The study, which used data collected by the Census Bureau, found that the median wealth of Hispanic households fell by 66 percent from 2005 to 2009. By contrast, the median wealth of whites fell by just 16 percent over the same period. African Americans saw their wealth drop by 53 percent. Asians also saw a big decline, with household wealth dropping 54 percent.

The declines have led to the largest wealth disparities in the 25 years that the bureau has been collecting the data, according to the report.

Median wealth of whites is now 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households, double the already marked disparities that had prevailed in the decades before the recent recession, the study found.

“It’s a very stark reminder of the high share of minorities who live at the economic margins of this country,” said Paul Taylor, executive vice president of the Pew Research Center and an author of the report. “These data really show their economic vulnerability.”

Household wealth, also referred to in the report as net worth, is made up of assets, like a house, a car, savings and stocks, minus debts, like mortgages, car loans and credit cards. It is tracked by the Census Bureau in the Survey of Income and Program Participation, a broad sampling of household wealth by race and ethnicity.

Nearly two-thirds of Hispanics’ median net worth in 2005 came from home equity, according to the report, and when the housing market collapsed, so did their wealth. Median home equity for Hispanics fell by 51 percent in the period of the survey. The drop was compounded by the fact that Hispanics tended to live in the places that were hit hardest in the recession, like Florida and California, the report said.

Armando Moya, a Mexican immigrant from Woodbridge, outside Washington, experienced these swings of fortune first-hand. For a few happy years, he believed he had avoided his father’s fate of scraping by. He bought a house with a backyard and opened a taco restaurant with his brothers. His bank account was growing, and he took his family on vacations several times a year.

Mr. Moya lives in Prince William County, where the Hispanic population more than tripled from 2000 to 2010, according to the Migration Policy Institute, with many newcomers working in construction trades that were flourishing in the rapidly growing suburbs of Washington.

To capitalize on the influx, Mr. Moya, who is now 38 and had been working in restaurants since he came to the United States in the early 1990s, decided to start his own, and together with his brother opened Ricos Tacos Moya in 2005.

In the same year, he bought a house valued at $350,000. His monthly payments were more than $2,300, and with hungry workers filling his restaurant, he managed.

But when the collapse of the housing market swept like a wave through this Northern Virginia county, taking his house, and his bank account, and many of his customers along with it, he lost his middle-class lifestyle.

“Everything was going down,” he said.

Now he is back where he started, living with his family in a rented apartment, and working seven days a week in the taco restaurant. His house sold for $135,000 to a couple from Morocco, he said.

“My money changed,” he said. “I lost my house.”

The share of Americans with no wealth at all rose sharply during the recession. A third of Hispanics had zero or negative net worth in 2009, up from 23 percent in 2005. For blacks, the portion rose to 35 percent from 29 percent, and for whites, it rose to 15 percent from 11 percent.

About a quarter of all black and Hispanic households owned nothing but a car in 2009. Just 6 percent of whites and 8 percent of Asians were in that situation.

Whites were less affected by the crisis, largely because their wealth flowed from assets other than housing, like stocks. A third of whites owned stocks and mutual funds in 2005, compared with 8 percent of Hispanics and 9 percent of blacks.

The median value of stocks and mutual funds owned by whites dropped by 9 percent from 2005 to 2009. In comparison, the median value of holdings for those blacks who held stocks dropped by 71 percent, most likely because they had to sell when prices were low, Mr. Taylor said.

The median wealth of Hispanic and black households is at its lowest point since 1984, when the Census Bureau first conducted the study, the report said.

Mr. Moya counts himself lucky to still have his restaurant. He has to work weekends at a nightclub in Washington to keep up with his rent. His life is increasingly resembling his father’s — subsisting, without saving — but he has pinned his hopes for a better life on his sons, and he has discarded the idea of returning to Mexico.

“I want my house back,” he said. “I’m working for my house right now.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 27, 2011


An article on Tuesday about the decline in wealth among Hispanic families misstated the name of the group that published the study detailing the decline. It is the Pew Research Center, not the Pew Foundation.

The Yawning Gap Between Desires, Expectations, and Reality in the Political Relationship Between President Obama and African Americans

http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/barack-obama-and-war-black-reality

All,

In a critically scathing analysis of the disturbing gaps between President Obama's actual political performance vis-a-vis the national African American community, and that community's general assessment of his performance, the radical political and social analyst, historian, author and activist Paul Street examines how and why this relationship has been so fraught with deep seated anxieties, desires, hopes, expectations, delusions, fears, fantasies, and frustrations induced by the social, cultural, and psychological impact of the first black Presidency in U.S. history.

Kofi


black unemployment [1]:

http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/african-america/black-unemployment


"Although President Obama “has had little to offer the nation’s truly disadvantaged people of color,” polls show that “nearly two-thirds of black respondents said the government was doing ‘about the right amount’ in terms of serving Black interests.” There exists a vast gap between the realities of Black life and false Black perceptions of progress. “The mind-blowing Obama ascendancy has pacified, blinded, deluded, distracted, and bamboozled the nation’s most historically progressive thinking, voting, and acting bloc to no small degree – a problem not just for the black community but for progressive prospects across the national board.”

Barack Obama and the War on Black Reality
by Paul Street
July 5, 2011
Black Agenda Report

This article originally appeared at www.paulstreet.org [5].

“Regular and symbolically powerful televised images of the first black president trump material, social, and political reality in the minds of many of contemporary American racism’s victims.”

Few aspects of America’s authoritarian, corporate-managed political culturei are more pernicious than its narrow fetish of candidate and office-holder identity. Consider the current state of political and economic opinion in Black America, long the United States’ most skeptical and leftmost ethno-cultural segment by far. That opinion stands in sharp contrast to material and political reality in ways that can only be explained by the fact of a first black presidency.

Black America’s Great Depression

Already terrible under the racist arch-plutocrat George W. Bush, black economic circumstances have worsened in the Age of Obama. As CBS reported last June 19th, official U.S. unemployment has recently risen to 9.1 percent for the general U.S. population but has surged to 16.2 percent for black Americans and 17.5 percent for black males. CBS correspondent Michelle Miller noted that “historically, the unemployment rate for African Americans has always been higher than the national average. However, now it's at Depression-era levels.”ii The official black unemployment measure has risen considerably since Obama took office, when it stood at 12.6.iii

The black poverty rate today is at least 26 percent, double that of white poverty. According to the eighth annual “State of the Dream” report from the progressive, Boston-based nonprofit United for a Fair Economy (UFE), released last January, more than half (59.1 percent) of older blacks rely on Social Security for more than 80 percent of their family income, as compared with 46 percent of older whites. Forty six years after the Civil Rights Movement pinnacled, UFE reported, blacks still earn only 57 cents for each white income dollars and blacks retain just 10 cents of net wealth for every dollar whites hold. Blacks are nearly three times as likely as whites to have zero or negative net worth. In the event of a job loss, 42 percent of black households lack the accumulated wealth worth to live for three months at the poverty level, while just 16.7 white households are in that position.iv

“Blacks still earn only 57 cents for each white income dollars and blacks retain just 10 cents of net wealth for every dollar whites hold.”

The foreclosure crisis has disproportionately damaged black homeowners. Relying on industry and industry data, the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL) estimates that between 2007 and 2009 nearly 8 percent of recent black American borrowers lost their homes to foreclosures, compared with 4.5 percent of whites, More than 1 in 5 black homeowners is in “imminent danger of foreclosure.” From 2009 to 2012, the CRL found, households living near foreclosed properties in African American and Latino communities will have seen their combined home values fall by more than $350 billion.. As Washington Post reporters Michael Fletcher and John Cohen observed last February, the foreclosure crisis is “particularly devastating to African American and Latino families, who already lag their white counterparts in terms of income, wealth and educational attainment,".v

In the transition from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, Fletcher and Cohen noted, black economic prospects have deteriorated markedly. “Wages, homeownership rates and employment levels all grew worse for African-Americans between 2000 and 2007, a time in which the overall economy expanded. Since then, things have gotten worse.” In the wake of an epic economic downturn that more than doubled U.S. unemployment and wiped away nearly a fifth of Americans' net worth, “African-Americans and Hispanics were more likely to be left broke, jobless and concerned that they lack the skills needed to shape their economic futures.” Elaborating on the Great Recession’s heavier toll on blacks, Fletcher and Cohen report that:

“The downturn obliterated years of African-American economic progress -- strides that were on shaky ground even before the recession. The share of black adults who were working slid to 52 percent, nearly seven points behind whites and Hispanics. In 2001, nearly 65 percent of white adults and just over 60 percent of blacks were employed.“

“Homeownership, which remains the primary engine of wealth creation for many Americans, has slipped among African-Americans. The foreclosure crisis pushed the black homeownership rate down to 45 percent, far below the 74 percent rate for whites, and the lowest rate since 1997.”

“At the same time, some of the most reliable paths for blacks to ascend to the middle class are in danger of being narrowed.”
“Federal, state and local governments, which employ a disproportionate share of African-Americans, are shedding jobs, a trend expected to continue in coming years. Meanwhile, the auto industry, long a bastion of high-paying, stable jobs that helped sustain many black middle-class families throughout the industrial Midwest, has been significantly downsized.”

Obama has offered no real help. “The Obama administration's $814 billion stimulus package is credited by many economists with preventing an even more severe downturn,” Fletcher and Cohen note, “yet black unemployment soared to its highest levels in a generation on Obama's watch.” vi

Blunt Lessons About Power and Race

Fletcher and Cohen cold have elaborated on the lack of assistance to black America from the first black president. Openly preposterous right-wing propaganda on FOX “News” and talk radio has painted him out as a radical left wealth-redistributing “socialist” and racial reparations activist. But the deeply conservative and “post-racial” Obama is a standard business- and white-friendly military-imperial centrist on the model of Richard Nixon, George (H.W.) Bush 41, or Bill Clinton. His policies have steered consistently in the center-right direction favored by Goldman Sachs, Boeing, and Exelon (to mention just a few of his top corporate sponsors in the last presidential election and “wealth primary”vii cycle). Under Obama, as under George (W.) Bush 43, “people everywhere [have] learned a blunt lesson about power, who has it and who doesn’t. They [have] watched,” William Greider noted early in the Obama administration, “Washington run to rescue the very financial interests that caused the catastrophe. They [have] learned that government has plenty of money to spend when the right people want it.”viii

The “right people” are those predominantly Caucasian few who already enjoy extreme concentrated wealth and the vast political and ideological influence that comes with that wealth like white on rice. Obama has honored their endlessly selfish interests in numerous ways, including an auto bailout deal which rewarded capital flight, raided union worker pension funds and slashed more jobs than the automobile corporations themselves were ready to cut. Obama has agreed to continue George W. Bush’s deficit-driving tax cuts for the very rich while instituting federal worker pay freezes and other forms of public retrenchment in the name of deficit reduction. His actions in office have had little to do with his progressive-sounding campaign rhetoric on behalf of people-friendly “change from the bottom up.”ix

“The deeply conservative and “post-racial” Obama is a standard business- and white-friendly military-imperial centrist on the model of Richard Nixon, George (H.W.) Bush 41, or Bill Clinton.”

They have certainly had nothing to do with an alleged presidential commitment to racial equality. In early December 2009, the nation’s first black president received some criticism from the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). Accusing the White House of ignoring the distinctively terrible economic plight of minorities, ten members of the caucus boycotted a key House committee vote on financial regulations. “We can no long afford for our public policy to be defined by the world view of Wall Street,” the CBC announced, adding that “policy for the least of these must be integrated into everything we do.” Obama flatly rejected the criticism in a special interview with USA Today and the Detroit Free Press. “It’s a mistake,” Obama told the newspapers, “to start thinking in terms of particular ethnic segments of the United States rather than to think that we are all in this together and we are all going to get out of this together.”x

While slight reduction in state prison populations have recently begun to emerge in response to fiscal constraints, the savage, viciously circular scourge of racially disparate mass black arrest, incarceration, and felony-marking marches on, branding millions of black Americans with an updated, “color blind” version of Jim Crow status.xi This grave and underestimated problem, which Obama knows very well from his days in Chicago,xii receives no attention whatsoever from the Obama administration – this despite an remarkable and historic nonviolent strike conducted by predominantly black prisoners across nine Georgia prisons last December and January.xiii

Just because he happened to be black, Obama announced early on, black Americans should have no reason to think that he would be any more willing than George W. Bush or Bill Clinton (or Herbert Hoover for that matter) to acknowledge and act against the distinctive oppression and inequality still experienced by many in the nation’s still highly segregated and relatively impoverished black population. The title of the USA Today article reporting Obama’s response to the CBC was on point: “President Says He Shouldn’t Put Focus on Blacks’ Troubles.” Even as he has been willing to help transfer trillions of taxpayer dollars into the opulent coffers of a small minority of predominantly white financial and corporate parasites who already own most of the nation’s wealth and who crashed the national and global economy in 2007 and 2008, the technically black former community organizer and state legislator “from” Chicago’s poor and predominantly black South Side has had little to offer the nation’s truly disadvantaged people of color at the bottom of the nation’s steep, overlapping pyramids of race and class.

“Hope is Still Alive”

Little, that is, other than the apparently hyper-potent symbolic fact of his skin color. Despite the terrible facts of timeworn racial disparity, accelerated black misery, and the “post-racial” president’s refusal to focus on specifically black problems, Obama still holds the approval of 88 percent of black Americans.xv More remarkable is the extent to which black Americans seem willing to turn a blind eye to worsening black economic circumstances in the Age of Obama. A poll conducted by The Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University last January and February found that 85 percent of blacks felt optimistic about their future, with 65 percent indicating they “feel secure about their financial situation.” Fifty-six percent of blacks, compared with 44 percent of whites, said the current economic situation was “not causing stress in their lives.” Sixty-two percent of blacks said they thought their family's financial situation will improve over the next year. (Such improvement is highly unlikely given epically slumping global capitalism’s slide into a double-dip recession and the fact that blacks still experience employment and wage discrimination, significant spatial and housing segregation, disproportionate lack of access to affordable health care, racist criminal justice policies and persistent predatory housing and lending practices by unscrupulous people in the financial and real estate industries.) As the black Washington Post staff reporter Michelle Singletary noted, “The confidence level of blacks in the race and recession survey is in stark contrast to the depressing economic data showing that the economic crisis is still plaguing the African American community…. In the black community, despite being battered by the latest recession, hope is still alive.”xvi

“Despite the terrible facts of timeworn racial disparity, accelerated black misery, and the ‘post-racial’ president’s refusal to focus on specifically black problems, Obama still holds the approval of 88 percent of black Americans.”

The Kaiser-Post-Harvard findings are consistent with a recent Rasmussen Reports survey showing that 61 percent of black voters think “the country is heading in the right direction.” This majority black optimism is shared by just 27 percent of all U.S. voters. Seventy-two percent of white voters and 60 percent of “other race” voters say “the country is on the wrong track.”xvii Even as the still highly segregated black U.S. community suffers disproportionately from the crisis of highly racialized American and global capitalism,xviii black American voters are more than twice as likely as American voters in general to see the savagely unequal and still deeply racist U.S. as moving in the “right direction.”

In a similar vein, a Pew Research Center report last summer found that Black America, the group damaged most in the Great Recession, was also the most enthusiastic about the state of the economy. Twenty-five percent of blacks told pollsters that the economy was doing good or excellent. This was nearly double the number of whites who thought that, even though Black unemployment was nearly double that of whites. Eighty-one percent of Blacks said America remained “a land of prosperity,” while just 59 percent of whites agreed with that statement – “even though,” as the dissident black left commentator and activist Glen Ford noted last year, “blacks make only 61 cents for every white dollar earned, the same as 30 years ago.” A 53 percent Black majority felt the economy was starting to recover, compared to just 40 percent of whites who thought that. The ironies were captured by Ford, who pulls no punches on black delusion, noting that:

“Fifty-four percent of Blacks took a pay cut, worked reduced hours or were forced to take unpaid leave during the Great Recession. Only 37 percent of whites suffered such employment trauma, yet Blacks are consistently – and insanely – more optimistic about the future, and feel better about the present, than whites do. Nearly a third of Blacks say they are in better economic shape than before the recession began – a figure with little basis in real life, and a perception that is at total war with reality. Everything is worse for every major Black demographic since December 2007.” xix

Strangest of all perhaps are the Kaiser-Post-Harvard poll’s findings on black perceptions of Obama’s policies. The January-February 2011 poll found that blacks and Hispanics were nearly half as likely as whites to say that the Obama administration was doing "too much" for Wall Street financial institutions – a curious statement from those most damaged by Wall Street’s actions and the White House’s rush to bail out the financial parasites. Nearly six in 10 blacks surveyed said they thought the president's actions were “making the economy better” – an opinion shared by a far lower percentage of whites. And when they were asked whether the Obama administration was paying enough attention to the economic interests of African-Americans, nearly two-thirds of black respondents said the government was doing "about the right amount" – this despite the White House’s explicitly stated lack of interest in making any kind of specific focus on blacks’ distinctively dreadful and worsening plight in the current economic crisis. xx

“The Fact That He is the First Black President….is …Hard to Separate from the Facts”

So what’s it all about? These are curious and (for me) disturbing things to learn about political beliefs in Black America, the segment of the U.S. citizenry and electorate that has long been the most skeptical of conventional American capitalist and imperial wisdom. Blacks have long comprised by far and away the leftmost and most reality-based and critical-thinking ethno-cultural segment of American society – a racial group taught by its multiply-oppressed experience to be particularly (and properly) unimpressed by the optimistic claims and grandiose promises of economic and political elites.

How explain the recent shift to undue black optimism in the face of stark material evidence that black America’s plight has been worsening in accord with the nation’s continuing refusal to acknowledge the reality of racial oppression? Without offering much in the way of evidence, the establishment black journalist Michelle Singletary of The Washington Post seems to think it’s about a combination of black religious faith and the role that black families have played in supporting each other and setting up independent black business through the recession.xxi In their write-up on the Kaiser-Post-Harvard poll last February, Fletcher and Cohen cited unnamed “analysts who study black prosperity” who claimed that “optimism is rooted in long experience with hard times.” These anonymous experts told Fletcher and Cohen “that now many African-Americans sense attention to their struggles at the highest levels of government, something that was not evident before the recession.”xxii But blacks’ “long experience with hard times” has never created such reality-assaulting mass black counter-factual optimism prior to the Obama presidency. And the notion that the current administration is focused in any special way on black struggles is simply false.

The early and intrepid Obama critic Glen Ford has a different take, “The psychological harm done to Black people by Obama’s presidency,” Ford wrote last July, “may be even greater than the economic and political damage. Barack Obama’s presidency is driving millions of African Americans insane – stone, cold out of their minds…. There is nothing to be upbeat about – except, for Obama supporters, the election of 2008. From that point on, a large segment of Black America became disconnected from reality, numb to their own pain and to the pain of their children.” xxiii

“The notion that the current administration is focused in any special way on black struggles is simply false.”

Ford was exaggerating for effect, perhaps, to make a basic and I think key point. The astonishing (for many) symbolic significance of black family residing in the White House has proved so powerful as to encourage a significant number of black Americans to disregard basic facts of material pain and racial disparity.

Algernon Austin, director of the Race, Ethnicity and the Economy program for the liberal Economic Policy Institute, made Ford’s basic point in more tepid and diplomatic terms last February. “The fact that he [Obama] is the first black president does have a powerful impact on people's perception of their opportunities and the future," Austin told the Washington Post. “It is kind of hard to separate that from the other facts."xxiv Regardless of Obama’s service to the white corporate elite that continues to consign the black community to Third World-like poverty inside “the world’s richest nation” – actually the most unequal and wealth-top-heavy nation in the industrialized world by far (nonetheless described by candidate Obama as “a magical place” where anything is possible) – and despite his willingness to kowtow to majority white racial fears (and racism-denial), regular and symbolically powerful televised images of the first black president trump material, social, and political reality in the minds of many of contemporary American racism’s victims. Anticipation of this terrible outcome and of a President Obama’s role in rendering that racism yet more invisible (and in giving American capitalism and imperialism a fake-progressive public relations makeover,) Ford and his fellow radical and black colleagues at Black Agenda Report were always horrified at the specter of an Obama presidency and what it would do to the prospects for an independent and progressive Black politics. The mind-blowing Obama ascendancy has pacified, blinded, deluded, distracted, and bamboozled the nation’s most historically progressive thinking, voting, and acting bloc to no small degree – a problem not just for the black community but for progressive prospects across the national board.

Going Forward

Still, Ford hastens to add that the news is not all bad. Obama’s black approval has fallen significantly since last year – from the mid 90s to its current 88 percent. The president’s fake-humanitarian military assault on the Muslim and African nation of Libya and his apparent lack of interest in the oppression of black migrant workers there has elicited significant grumbling in sections of the black political class. A resurgence of independent black activism and movement formation will not require Obama to lose majority black support (something that Ford doubts will ever happen). A fall of his black approval into the 60s will be quite significant, Ford feels, indicating new black independence. Much of the high black approval that Obama receives in opinion surveys naturally reflects defensive black horror at the racist threat provided by perceived Republican presidential opponents like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman and the right wing white nationalists associated with “the Tea Party” and the Republican Party more broadly. Many black people never get contacted by pollsters, including the millions stuck in prison and jail, many of whom can have few illusions about “hope” and “change.” What is required most is the resurgence of militant rank and file social movement activity in black America, beneath the personalized spectacle of national politics, and that is something that can very well expand in coming months and years even as Obama continues to receive high black approval ratings. It will have more space to develop when the all-too paralyzing Obama factor is concluded, something that could well happen in the next presidential election. xxv

Paul Street’s latest book (co-authored with Anthony DiMaggio) is Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2011). Street can be reached at paulstreet99@yahoo.com [6]


SELECTED NOTES

i Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).


ii CBS News, “African-American unemployment at 16 percent” (June 19, 2011) at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/06/19/eveningnews/main20072425.shtml

iii “Black unemployment soared in January,” Daily Voice (February 6, 2009) at http://thedailyvoice.com/voice/2009/02/black-unemployment-soars-001583.php [7]

iv

United for a Fair Economy, State of the Dream: Austerity for Whom? (January 2011), read at http://www.faireconomy.org/files/State_of_the_Dream_2011.pdf [8]


v Michelle Singletary, “In Rough Economic Times, Black Americans Hold on to Their Optimism,” Washington Post (February 19, 2011) at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/19/AR2011021903265_pf.html [9]

vi Michael A. Fletcher and Jon Cohen, “Poll Finds Minorities More Optimistic About Economy Despite Losses,” Washington Post, February 20, 2011 at http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2011/feb/20/21econ/ [10]


vii. The United States’ plutocratic, elections system is captive to what Harvard Law graduate John Bonifaz calls “the wealth primary: that exclusionary process, leading up to every party primary and every general election, in which those with money or access to money choose by means of their campaign contributions the candidates who almost invariably go on to govern.” Bonifaz elaborates: “Those candidates who do not raise enough money -- that is, those who lose the wealth primary -- almost always do not win office….The rest of us, the vast majority of American people, are shut out of this process.” See John Bonifaz, “Losing Our Vote in the Wealth Primary” (1995) at http://archive.fairvote.org/reports/1995/chp6/bonifaz.html [11]


viii William Greider, “Obama Asked Us to Speak but Is He Listening?” Washington Post, March 22, 2009.

ix

For my own efforts to track Obama’s top-down service to the rich powerful, in total defiance and betrayal of his declared faith in “change from the bottom up” through early April of 2010, see Paul Street, Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Paradigm, 2008); Paul Street, The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Paradigm, 2010).For the period since, see numerous articles posted on my Z Space page at http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/paulstreet [12] and my Web site at www.paulstreet.org [5]


x Justin Hyde and Richard Wolf, “President Says He Shouldn’t Put Focus on Blacks’ Troubles,” USA Today, December 4, 2009.

xi

See Michelle Alexander’s powerful book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness (New York: New Press, 2010).


xii At a heavily attended public gathering on Chicago’s South Side in October of 2002, state senator Obama commented knowledgeably on my exhaustive study The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs and Community in Chicago, Illinois, and the Nation (Chicago, IL: Chicago Urban League, October 2002).


xiii Vanita Gupta and Chara Fisher Jackson, “Georgia Prison Strike an Outgrowth of Nation’s Addiction to Incarceration,” ACLU Blog of Rights (January 6, 2011) at http://www.aclu.org/blog/prisoners-rights/georgia-prison-strike-outgrowth-nations-addiction-incarceration [13]


xiv

Candidate Obama claimed again and again to be “from the South Side of Chicago.” He was in fact more significantly from an elite prep school in Honolulu, Columbia University, Harvard Law, the University of Chicago, and an elite network of foundations. His community organizing stint was quite brief and for him unpleasant.

xv

Susan Page, “What Comes After HOPE? Obama Seeks Reshaped Image for 2012 Effort,” USA Today, June 6, 2011, 2 (citing Gallup data).

xvi

Singletary, “In Rough Economic Times.”


xvii Rasmussen Reports, “Right Direction or Wrong Track: 27% Say U.S. Heading in Right Direction” (June 15, 2011) at http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/mood_of_america/right_direction_or_wrong_track [14]

xviii For useful reflections on the racist dynamics of the current capitalist crisis, see David McNally’s important Marxist analysis Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance (Black Point, Nova Scotia: PM Press, 2010), 103, 113-43.

xix Pew Social Trends Staff, How the Great Recession Has Changed Life in America (June 30, 2010) at http://pewsocialtrends.org/2010/06/30/how-the-great-recession-has-changed-life-in-america/ [15]; Glen Ford, “First Black Presidency Has Driven Many African Americans Insane,” Black Agenda Report (July 26, 2010) at http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/first-black-presidency-has-driven-many-african-americans-insane [16]

xx Fletcher and Cohen, “Poll Finds Minorities More Optimistic.”


xxi Singletary, “In Rough Economic Times.”


xxii Fletcher and Cohen, “Poll Finds Minorities More Optimistic.”


xxiii Ford, “First Black Presidency.”


xxiv Fletcher and Cohen, “Poll Finds Minorities More Optimistic.”


xxv Telephone conversation with Ford, June 21, 2011.

Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/barack-obama-and-war-black-reality

Links:

[1] http://blackagendareport.com/category/african-america/black-unemployment
[2] http://blackagendareport.com/category/us-politics/democrats
[3] http://blackagendareport.com/category/us-politics/obama-delusional-affect
[4] http://blackagendareport.com/sites/www.blackagendareport.com/files/delerious_deleterious.jpg
[5] http://www.paulstreet.org/
[6] mailto:paulstreet99@yahoo.com
[7] http://thedailyvoice.com/voice/2009/02/black-unemployment-soars-001583.php
[8] http://www.faireconomy.org/files/State_of_the_Dream_2011.pdf
[9] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/19/AR2011021903265_pf.html
[10] http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2011/feb/20/21econ/
[11] http://archive.fairvote.org/reports/1995/chp6/bonifaz.html
[12] http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/paulstreet
[13] http://www.aclu.org/blog/prisoners-rights/georgia-prison-strike-outgrowth-nations-addiction-incarceration
[14] http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/mood_of_america/right_direction_or_wrong_track
[15] http://pewsocialtrends.org/2010/06/30/how-the-great-recession-has-changed-life-in-america/
[16] http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/first-black-presidency-has-driven-many-african-americans-insane
[17] http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fblackagendareport.com%2Fcontent%2Fbarack-obama-and-war-black-reality&linkname=Barack%20Obama%20and%20the%20War%20on%20Black%20Reality

Published on Black Agenda Report (http://blackagendareport.com)