My Civil Rights Field Trip to the Capital of Inequality

In a somewhat mysterious calculation that was financially supported by leading global investment corporation J.P. Morgan Chase, GI's number crunchers determined that Black America suffers from an "Equality Index" of 0.73. This means that black Americans are just less three fourths the equal of whites on a scale that posits zero as absolute inequality and 1.0 as absolute equality. This was the main statistic cited in the Urban League's SOBA report. I never got hold of GI's analyst to ask him how his 0.73 number jibed with leading academic Thomas Shapiro's finding - reported in the first chapter of the 2005 SOBA volume - that "the 1999 net worth (all assets minus all liabilities) of typical white families is $81,000 compared to $8,000 for black families." That's 10 cents of black net worth for every dollar of white net worth. By the recessionary year of 2002, thanks to usual racial disparities in the capitalist business cycle, black net worth had fallen (according to Shapiro) to seven cents on the white dollar. JP Morgan Chase has been working hard to look racially sensitive ever since it was learned that thousands of black slaves were used as collateral for loans by two banks that later became part of what NUL chief Marc Morial called (last Tuesday) "the JP Morgan Chase family." The big white daddy in that family - CEO William Harrison - received a pay package of $20 million in 2003.[more ]