Recession reverses blacks’ economic gains

Associated Press

BALTIMORE

Growing up black in the segregated 1960s, Deborah Goldring slept two to a bed, got evicted from apartment after apartment, and watched her stepfather climb utility poles to turn their disconnected lights back on. Yet Goldring pulled herself out of poverty and earned a middle-class life — until the Great Recession.

First, Goldring’s husband fell ill, and they drained savings to pay for nursing homes before he died. Then Goldring lost her job in the Baltimore hospital where she had worked for 17 years. The cruelest blow was a letter from the bank, intending to foreclose on her home.

Millions of Americans endured similar financial calamities in the recession. But for Goldring and many others in the black community, where unemployment has risen since the end of the recession, job loss has knocked them out of the middle class and back into poverty. Some even see a historic reversal of hard-won economic gains that took black people decades to achieve.

Goldring remembers her mother taping the window shades to the wall so no one could see them stealing electricity. She remembers each time she sat on the curb with her three brothers, surrounded by her family’s belongings, waiting for a new place to live. Sitting on those curbs, she promised to always pay bills on time.

Now, after finding herself poor again, “the only word I can say is devastated,” says Goldring, 58.

Economists say the Great Recession lasted from 2007 to 2009. In 2004, the median net worth of white households was $134,280, compared with $13,450 for black households, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by the Economic Policy Institute. By 2009, the median net worth for white households had fallen 24 percent to $97,860; the median black net worth had fallen 83 percent to $2,170, according to the EPI.

Algernon Austin, director of the EPI’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy, described the wealth gap this way: “In 2009, for every dollar of wealth the average white household had, black households only had two cents.”

Since the end of the recession, the overall unemployment rate has fallen from 9.4 percent to 9.1 percent, while the black unemployment rate has risen from 14.7 percent to 16.2 percent, according to the Department of Labor.

Goldring was born and raised in Baltimore, and her mother was single for much of Goldring’s childhood. At 16, she dropped out of school and went to work cleaning hotel rooms. She didn’t know any middle-class people in her all-black neighborhood. “Where we lived, everyone struggled.”

At 21, pregnant with her second child, Goldring decided to get her GED. Then she went to community college, got a degree in secretarial work, and began a career.

She met her husband in 1983. He had a steady job as a heating and air-conditioning installer.

With two incomes, money was not a problem. Then Goldring’s husband died in 2007. In 2009, her hospital “restructured” and let her go.

This May, black male employment fell to the lowest level since the government began keeping track in 1972. Only 56.1 percent of black men over age 20 worked, compared with 68.3 percent of white men.

College-educated blacks fared worse than their white counterparts in the recession. In 2007, unemployment for college-educated whites was 1.8 percent; for college-educated blacks it was 2.7 percent. Now, the college-educated unemployment rate is 3.9 percent for whites and 7 percent for blacks.

Some see a bitter irony in soaring black unemployment and the decline of the black middle class on the watch of the first black president.

“I thought Barack Obama could have provided some way out. But he lacks backbone,” Princeton professor Cornel West told truthdig.com recently.

He said Obama had sold out the poor and become “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats ... I don’t think in good conscience I could tell anybody to vote for Obama.”

Yet many jobless blacks do not blame their plight on the president.

Goldring doesn’t think Obama is doing a bad job. “The unemployment situation is not the best, but I don’t think it has a lot to do with him,” she says. “Fixing this economy, it’s going to take time.”