A double whammy

By William A. COLLINS

OthereWords

Given that we now have an African-American president, many Americans feel comfortable sweeping the issue of racial discrimination under the rug. How bad can bias be if we elected Barack Obama?

Well, pretty bad. The numbers are dismal. While white unemployment is stuck at around 7.5 percent, black Americans are suffering 16 percent. In terms of household net worth, it’s worse. The median for white families has slumped to $113,000, but black households have been reduced to an unsustainable $5,700, and Latinos to $6,300. Like many of our society’s economic gaps, this one is steadily widening, not least because people of color are often the first workers to be laid off.

Budget cuts have produced similar sinister results. With state and local deficits spreading panic across the land, government employees are being laid off in droves. This is a double whammy for black Americans, for whom the public sector is the single biggest source of employment. As front-line municipal service providers to poorer citizens, their jobs are often the first to go. And needless to say, the low-income communities they serve are heavily minority too, so government downsizing leaves both provider and recipient alike to stew in the cauldron of poverty.

Racial profiling

Meanwhile, racial profiling remains rampant in law enforcement, especially concerning drugs, for which mindlessly draconian penalties still endure.

So now it turns out that a couple measurable and understandable social phenomena have blossomed amid this flood of discrimination. The largest is the continued movement of blacks to the South, a trend that began in the late 1990s. Living is cheaper there, family roots can be embraced, and it’s warmer. Jim Crow may not be dead, but since he now lives in the North as well, what’s to lose?

Similarly, with jobs disappearing amid a hostile economic landscape, black women are joining the military in percentages far exceeding their numbers in the general population. It’s not a bad measure of how rotten their civilian life has become.

William A. Collins is a former state representative, and a former mayor of Norwalk, Connecticut. He wrote this for OtherWords, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies.