Originally published in The New York Times September 26, 2004 Sunday
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
By HENRY LOUIS GATES JR..
E-mail:
hlgates@nytimes.com
When black policy types let themselves dream about racial
uplift, they dream about getting to average. The fantasy isn't that
inequality vanishes; it's that inequality in black America catches up
with inequality in white America. And, for the moment, a fantasy is all
it is. Since the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the
black middle class has increased significantly, yet the percentage of
black children living in poverty has hovered between 30 and 40 percent.
''Look at what we could achieve if we got to be average!'' Franklin
Raines, the C.E.O. of Fannie Mae, told me. ''We don't need to take
everybody from the ghetto and make them Harvard graduates. We just need
to get folks to average, and we'd all look around and say, 'My God,
what a fundamental change has happened in this country.'''
How big a change? He's done the math. ''If America had
racial equality in education and jobs, African-Americans
would have two million more high school degrees, two million more
college degrees, nearly two million more professional and managerial
jobs, and nearly $200 billion more income,'' he pointed out in a
speech. ''If America had racial equality in housing, three million more
Americans would own their own homes. And if America had racial equality
in wealth, African-Americans
would have $760 billion more in equity value, $200 billion more in the
stock market, $120 billion more in their retirement funds and $80
billion more in the bank.'' Total: Over $1 trillion.
Recently, I asked a few experts on poverty in black America about how
we might get to average. I heard a lot of deep breaths. When they
picture black America, they see Buffalo -- a boarded-up central city
and a few lakefront mansions. The glory days for the black working
class were from 1940 to 1970, when manufacturing boomed and factory
jobs were plentiful. But when the manufacturing sector became eclipsed
by the service economy, black workers ended up -- well, stuck in a
demographic Buffalo.
My colleague
William Julius Wilson, the sociologist, thinks better manpower policies
would help. Once black workers moved to where the jobs were; they need
to do it again. Instead of trying to turn ghettos into boomtowns, then,
we ought to provide workers with relocation assistance, and create
''transitional public sector jobs'' for those who haven't yet found a
private-sector gig. Oh, and -- since we're dreaming -- fixing the
schools would be nice, including ''school-to-work transition
programs,'' to place high school grads in the job market.
Raines, as you might expect, considers homeownership to be crucial to
wealth generation. ''The average person develops more wealth in their
home than they do in the stock market. Next to a job, it's the most
important thing in a family's lives.'' Blacks, he notes, are
considerably less likely to own their own homes than whites.
How to afford one, though? ''The whole new service economy is
fundamentally based on communications, the Internet, electronics,'' he
told me. ''That infrastructure is going to need people who can manage
it, and those jobs are going to move from very high tech to being
service jobs, just the way it happened at the telephone company. You
used to have to be a scientist to operate a phone, and then it became a
blue-collar job.''
But maybe, as the
economist Glenn Loury suggests, we need to aim lower. ''There doesn't
seem to be an end in sight to the vast, disproportionate
overrepresentation of African-Americans in prison or jails,'' he told
me. ''It's our deepest problem.'' Job training for willing prisoners
would be a good start.
Loury considers welfare reform a success: ''We ask a lot more of
mothers, and they have given us a lot more, and they and we are both
better off for our having asked.'' When it comes to education, though,
he advocates ''equal expenditures per kid, no matter where they live.''
In fact, he'd spend more money on inferior school districts, at least
over the short run, to bring them up to standard.
Would any of these initiatives really make much of a difference in an
age of offshoring? As everyone I spoke to agreed, we're unlikely to
find out. There just isn't the political will, in either party. The
White House has relegated its costly experiments in social engineering
to Iraq. And so the 60's generation now seems to be presiding over the
permanent entrenchment of a vast black underclass.
Has average really become too much to ask for?
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