Recent Forum Topics › Forums › The Public House › Class, race, inequality within the black community
- This topic has 7 replies, 2 voices, and was last updated 7 years, 10 months ago by
zn.
-
AuthorPosts
-
November 30, 2016 at 9:06 am #59833
wvParticipantSome numbers on rising inequality WITHIN the black community. Fwiw.
w
v
===================================
World Socialist Website
link:https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/08/30/pers-a30.html
…..
see link…In fact, black households earning more than $75,000 are the fastest growing income group in the country. According to Nielsen, “In the years from 2005-2013, the income bracket with the largest increase for Black households occurred in the number of households earning over $200,000, with an increase of 138 percent, compared to an increase of 74 percent for the total population.”In 1960, around the time E. Franklin Frazier wrote his pioneering work, The Black Bourgeoisie, there were an estimated 25 black millionaires in the US. That number has grown 1,400 times. Today there are an estimated 35,000 black millionaires.
The concentration of wealth among African Americans is extreme. According to the Pew Research Study, 35 percent of black households have negative or no net worth. Another 15 percent have less than $6,000 in total household worth. Nearly 7 million of the total of 14 million black households have little or nothing.
Commentator Antonio Moore in the Huffington Post this past May noted that the wealth difference between an American black household in the top 1 percent and the average black household was several times larger than that among comparable white households.
“[T]he median net worth of the few black households in the top 1 percent was $1.2 million dollars, while according to the Census, median net worth for all black households was about $6,000 in total. A black family in the 1 percent is worth a staggering 200 times that of an average black family. If black America were a country, we would be among the most wealth stratified in the world.”
“Income segregation,” i.e., the tendency of people to live in either poor or affluent neighborhoods, has increased sharply among black families since 1970. “Segregation by income among black families was lower than among white families in 1970, but grew four times as much between 1970 and 2009. By 2009, income segregation among black families was 65 percent greater than among white families.” (Residential Segregation by Income, 1970-2009, by Kendra Bischoff of Cornell University and Sean F. Reardon of Stanford)
According to the Washington Post in 2013, the black middle class, measured by the number of families earning at least $100,000 a year, has grown fivefold in the past 50 years. About one in 10 black households are now in that income category. Between 1970 and 1990, the percentage of black physicians, lawyers and engineers doubled. From 1990 to 2013, there was a 30 percent increase in the proportion of black managers and executives and a 38 percent increase in the proportion of black lawyers and engineers.
Decades of “black capitalism” and affirmative action have benefited a narrow but still substantial layer of the African American population. This is the social element that is most aggressively pursuing wealth and economic advantage today. It cannot be mere coincidence that the central figure in the University of Missouri protests in November 2015, hunger striker Jonathan Butler, came from this milieu. His father, Eric Butler, is executive vice president for marketing and sales at Union Pacific Corp. and raked in $2.9 million in total compensation in 2015.
Importantly, African Americans have gained virtual parity with whites in the professional upper echelons. By 2004, blacks with a doctorate had a median income of $74,207, slightly higher than the median income of whites with doctoral degrees ($73,993). (The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education)
As a recent report (“Closing the Race Gap: Alleviating Young African American Unemployment Through Education”) argued, “African Americans and whites have nearly equal probabilities of employment at high degrees of education.”
What are the implications of this relative parity?
The obsession with race and gender involves the striving for privileges by a layer of black and female professionals, determined to carve out careers and incomes—under conditions of an intensely competitive “marketplace”—at the expense of their white or male counterparts. The shrillness and falsity of the current campaigns on race and sexual violence has much to do with the need, in the face of the fact that there is no significant racial or gender pay gap for these already affluent layers, to leverage past crimes and injustice, and exaggerate the present conditions, to justify continued or greater privileges. This is a bitter conflict taking place within the richest 5 to 10 percent (approximately $190,000 to $130,000 in annual income) of the population.
There is nothing “progressive” or “left-wing” about these campaigns and conflicts. Whether or not the president of the United States is a man or woman or the CEO of a bank or major corporation is white or black is of no possible interest to the working class. E. Franklin Frazier noted half a century ago that black business and political interests had “exploited the Negro masses as ruthlessly as have whites.”
Socialists reject racialist politics in whatever form it appears. In the context of the 2016 elections, this means repudiating the racialist and nationalist filth promulgated by both the Democrats and Republicans and all those who orbit around bourgeois politics. The election campaign of the Socialist Equality Party alone represents the independent political and historical interests of the working class.
David Walsh
November 30, 2016 at 9:35 am #59834znModeratorThe obsession with race and gender involves the striving for privileges by a layer of black and female professionals, determined to carve out careers and incomes—under conditions of an intensely competitive “marketplace”—at the expense of their white or male counterparts.
This is such bullshit.
Who wrote this?
This is not the time to be divisive that way.
With people striving for doctrinaire ideological purity and the divisions that entails.
A real left is a collection of affiliations. Different interests and viewpoints, acting in alliance.
This guy sounds like a goose-stepping “let’s be uniform about this” type.
There will never be an successful american left that approaches it that way. That just means in-fighting.
November 30, 2016 at 9:47 am #59836wvParticipantThe obsession with race and gender involves the striving for privileges by a layer of black and female professionals, determined to carve out careers and incomes—under conditions of an intensely competitive “marketplace”—at the expense of their white or male counterparts.
This is such bullshit.
Who wrote this?
This is not the time to be divisive that way.
With people striving for doctrinaire ideological purity and the divisions that entails.
A real left is a collection of affiliations. Different interests and viewpoints, acting in alliance.
This guy sounds like a goose-stepping “let’s be uniform about this” type.
There will never be an successful american left that approaches it that way. That just means in-fighting.
===========
You are rarely so emotional, zn 🙂
I actually agree with a lot of what the writer says. And i also agree with what you have said.
And i agree with bell hooks. Again.
w
v
“… I’m actually for a more communal division of labor. If we have a community where people seem to be more hip about gender, but not very hip about class, then I think that we need to strategically go for that framework of understanding which is missing, rather than to assume that one framework should always be centered on. I believe that Black women are very susceptible to bourgeois hedonistic consumerism because women are so much the targets of mass media. So, clearly, a lot of critical thinking about materialism in our lives is crucial to engaging Black women in revolutionary struggle. So that class, again, comes up and we haven’t had enough Black women leaders.
But the point is, we need to also know how some of these women, many of whom came from bourgeois families, began to acquire a more revolutionary consciousness–if, indeed, they have acquired that consciousness. It’s also easier, a lot of times, for Black women to talk about gender and ignore class because many of us are non-divesting of our support of capitalism and our longing for luxury. I think that it’s one thing to enjoy the good life and to enjoy beauty and things, and another thing to feel like you’re willing to support the killing of other people in other countries so that you can have your fine car and other luxuries. …” bell hooks“We don’t hear much from revolutionary feminists who are white because they’re not serving the bourgeois agenda of the status quo. They’re a small minority, but they are there and they are useful allies in the struggle. So I try not to use those monolithic terms anymore that I used in the beginning with Ain’t I A Woman…’ bell hooks
November 30, 2016 at 11:04 am #59842znModeratorHooks and I see this the same way. You have to look at all The Things. Which why I said it’s alliance politics.
Your goose-stepping world socialist guy was dismissing race and gender (on the basis of a very bad argument on top of it). That’s not what me n bell hooks do.
November 30, 2016 at 12:48 pm #59847wvParticipantHooks and I see this the same way. You have to look at all The Things. Which why I said it’s alliance politics.
Your goose-stepping world socialist guy was dismissing race and gender (on the basis of a very bad argument on top of it). That’s not what me n bell hooks do.
————-
Well, first off, i like the goose-stepping guy just fine, and i think we need his point of view. Even though ultimately, i agree that CLASS-race-gender are ALL important and mixed together, etc.But here’s why i like goose-stepping guy and i wish there were more goose-stepping articles and not less — WHICH of the big three — race, gender, class — gets ignored in the MSM and in America in general? You KNOW the answer is Class. The other two big-issues are much more accessible to mainstreamers.
But Class gets ignored, for lots of reasons i dont need to tell you about.
So, i think a little shit-stirring might be ok, when it comes to goose-stepping articles and such. They might make people want to argue about CLASS. They might make people wonder what the hell that guy is so upset about….etc.
Now, IN THE END, i think Race-class-gender have to be joined. In the end all those groups need to battle TOGETHER. But right now ONE of those issues aint even at the party. And so, i dont mind a shit-stirring article full of wrong-headed divisive ideas. Its no different to me than supporting BLACK lives matter. Instead of ALL lives matter. Sure all lives matter, but right now, at this point we need some shit-stirring about BLACK lives mattering.
Same with Class. POOR people matter. Right now. Maybe someday we can say ALL people matter. Not there yet. And i think bell hooks would agree with everything i just wrote. 🙂
w
vNovember 30, 2016 at 1:04 pm #59851znModeratorBut the MSM is never right about anything. So nothing new there. The issue for me then is not whether the MSM “says the right things” (it never does) but whether leftists are divisive or forge alliances.
To me, that doesn’t justify sentences like this from Mr. Goose: Socialists reject racialist politics in whatever form it appears. In the context of the 2016 elections, this means repudiating the racialist and nationalist filth promulgated by both the Democrats and Republicans and all those who orbit around bourgeois politics.
That’s not what bell hooks is saying in your quotation there. She’s saying the opposite:
I think that we need to strategically go for that framework of understanding which is missing, rather than to assume that one framework should always be centered on.
He IS saying one framework should be centered on.
November 30, 2016 at 3:57 pm #59868wvParticipantBut the MSM is never right about anything. So nothing new there. The issue for me then is not whether the MSM “says the right things” (it never does) but whether leftists are divisive or forge alliances.
To me, that doesn’t justify sentences like this from Mr. Goose: Socialists reject racialist politics in whatever form it appears. In the context of the 2016 elections, this means repudiating the racialist and nationalist FILTH promulgated by both the Democrats and Republicans and all those who orbit around bourgeois politics.
That’s not what bell hooks is saying in your quotation there. She’s saying the opposite:
I think that we need to strategically go for that framework of understanding which is missing, rather than to assume that one framework should always be centered on.
He IS saying one framework should be centered on.
—————-
I totally see your point about the purist-socialist’s language.And i totally get your annoyance about it.
And i wish there were MORE annoying shit-stirring articles like it.
Not cause I agree with the language. But because I think somehow, someway, the CLASS argument has to be presented to the identity-politics folks. I just want the conversation STARTED. Somehow, someway. If all i can have is THAT kind of purist bullshit article — I’ll take it. As a start. Its a process.
w
vNovember 30, 2016 at 7:55 pm #59895znModeratorI just want the conversation STARTED. Somehow, someway. If all i can have is THAT kind of purist bullshit article — I’ll take it. As a start. Its a process.
My bet is, if you keep casting your net, it’s out there.
BUT it is true that this is a complicated issue and some folks instinctively want it simplified.
-
AuthorPosts
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
