African Americans and Unprecedented Poverty

African American history is the heart of American history. This is true because the manipulation and the exploitation of African Americans, along with their ceaseless struggle for freedom and equality, has somehow been at the center of virtually every major political and economic turning point in the country¹s history. This fact is reflected today in the growth and consolidation of a new class of poor with African Americans at its core, a class that is compelled to fight for a new society. We talk of a "new class" of poor because this poverty is unprecedented in its nature and scope. Advancing electronic technology is so revolutionizing the economy that jobs are being eliminated faster than they are being created. This process is creating a new class of people who are essentially economically superfluous; their labor is no longer needed. This class includes not only the permanently unemployed, but the millions of temporary and contingent workers and the low-wage workers who don't even make enough to live on. The first to be plunged into this new poverty were the unskilled and semi-skilled, but today even highly skilled workers are not safe from having their jobs automated or outsourced.  the grim statistics bear out the position of the African American worker at the heart of the new class of poor:

•  By one estimate, nearly 25 percent of all African Americans have incomes below the official poverty line. Other sources put the figure at 33 percent.

•  12 percent of African American men ages 20 to 34 are in jail, compared with 1.6 percent of white men in the same age group.

•  74 percent of those sent to prison on drug charges are black.

• 50 percent of New York City¹s black males are unemployed.

 These figures should be seen in the context of the overall polarity of wealth that has developed in our country:

• The top 1 percent of all U.S. households own 38 percent of all wealth. Wealth inequality generally fell from 1929 to the mid 1970s, but since then, it has doubled.

•  5 percent of Americans own 59 percent of all wealth; the top 20 percent own 83 percent of all wealth. The bottom 20 percent have zero wealth.

  The value of the minimum wage has fallen 35 percent in real terms since its peak in 1968. [more