THE GREAT BLACK DEPRESSION
The foreclosure crisis among African Americans gives a clear sense of the despair and devastation wrought by what can only be called the Great Black Depression.
The 2008 recession threatened the economic foundations of the country; over and over again we heard from economists and pundits that the nation had not experienced anything like this since the Great Depression. Venerable financial institutions collapsed. Liquidity froze. Jobs disappeared overnight. The recession cast a dark economic shadow over America.
But in black America, the reality was even bleaker. I mean this beyond the familiar platitude that says, “Whenever white America has a cold, black America has the flu.”
The reality is that by every relevant statistical measure (employment, wages, wealth, etc.) black America has experienced and is experiencing a depression. This is more like the symptoms of a national congenital disease than the flu.
To be sure, the circumstances of black America have waxed and waned since the heyday of the civil rights movement.
The black freedom struggle of the 1960s brought unprecedented improvement in the lives of most African-Americans. But even with these gains, the gap between whites and blacks persisted through the 1970s and 1980s alongside brewing racial tensions (often because of police violence) and deepening class divisions within black America. Combined with cyclical economic booms and busts, the slow march from the end of Jim Crow to full equality felt more like a bad roller-coaster ride. It was not until the long recovery of the 1990s, spurred by governmental policy and strong economic growth, that we began to see significant economic improvements for black America — particularly for the black middle class.
Fast-forward to the Great Black Depression of 2008. Much of the gains of the 1990s were erased. African-Americans lost 31 percent of their wealth between 2007 and 2010. White Americans lost 11 percent. By 2009, 35 percent of African-American households had zero or negative net worth. According to the Pew Research Center, by 2011, black families had lost 53 percent of their wealth. Just think about it: an entire decade of economic gains wiped away. Gone. This wasn’t just the loss of homes — the primary source of wealth for most African-Americans — but lost retirement savings, which shrank by 35 percent from 2007 to 2010. As many struggled to save their homes, as they witnessed the stock market spiral downward and their pensions dwindle to nothing, they took out what little money they had invested in order to keep themselves afloat. Many could not wait for the market to rebound to reap its benefits. Their children won’t be able to either.
As they lost their homes and saw their savings wiped out, people also lost their jobs, making it hard to imagine ever clawing their way back to where they’d once been.
Often the last hired and first fired, people saw black unemployment soar as a result of the economic collapse. So much so that by November 2010, national black unemployment reached the stunning level of 16 percent (and this figure does not include those who simply dropped out of the labor market). White unemployment stood at 9 percent. Some cities, including Detroit and New York, reported unemployment among black males at close to 50 percent.
For all these reasons, poverty is growing in black America. One out of four African-Americans lives in poverty today. One out of three black children grows up in poverty, while only one out of ten white children lives in poverty. One out of five black children is growing up in extreme poverty. That child’s parents make less than $11,746 a year for a family of four. They live on $979 a month, $226 a week, or what ends up being $32 a day. In twenty-five of the fifty states and in the District of Columbia, at least 40 percent of African-American children are poor. This is galling for a nation that considers itself the leader of the free world and a pioneer of democratic principles.
Given the impact on African American children, this crisis is not only an event of the present. Its implications for future generations of African-Americans have yet to be calculated. Chris Frazer’s six year old grandson will remember the horror of police tossing his family’s possessions out in the yard like garbage as they were evicted, but beyond those memories, what will he inherit? Like so many young African Americans in this country, he will have to start economically with little or no help from the previous generation, because social and systemic barriers have severely limited economic mobility for black folk; the Great Black Depression took the one thing his grandmother could claim as her own. His financial inheritance will be a balance of broken promises.
Such crushing poverty dashes the dreams of millions of children daily. But not only that: it almost ensures that they will lead less healthy lives as they grow up; that they will more than likely drop out of high school; that they will experience some form of violence in their lifetime; that they will likely find themselves caught up in the criminal justice system; and that they will end up raising their children in the same horrifying conditions they grew up in. In short, the terrible effects of the Great Black Depression guarantee, unless we fully understand the urgency of now, that even darker days are ahead.
The very foundations of black America have cracked under the weight of the economic fallout. It has affected what we own, how we work, and the future of our children. But what’s really scary is how little anyone outside black America seems to care.
Reprinted from DEMOCRACY IN BLACK: HOW RACE STILL ENSLAVES THE AMERICAN SOUL Copyright (c) 2016 by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. Published by Crown Publishers, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, on January 12.
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