The ROI of Being African American
Rob Long
August 22, 2014 at 6:08 am ( 3 hours ago )
17 COMMENTS ·
There have been a lot of statistics thrown around this past week about race, violence, crime, and families. But this one, from The Guardian, brought me up short:
One study shows that while a white family turns every $1 of income into $5 of wealth, for the typical African American family that $1 translates into a mere 69 cents of wealth.
We know how progressive liberals interpret this. Just read The Guardian article — it’s all about the “inequality” and “racist status quo” of American society.
But as long as the average white family is building economic wealth (by saving, owning a home, and investing in education and the future) while the average African American family is not, the question is, why not? And the secondary question is, if we go back fifty years — or even sixty, to a time before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when a young black boy like Emmett Till could be brutally murdered by a bunch of white thugs in Money, Mississippi with impunity — would that statistic be as bleak, as hopeless?
I don’t know. I imagine it would be hard to calculate, retroactively, what the return-on-investmtent was on one dollar of African American wealth in 1954. Maybe it would be higher. Maybe the same. Maybe even a little bit less.
But it still suggests that the problems in the African American community — in the African American family – have less and less to do with racism. It’s hard to argue that America is more racist now than it was in 1954. It’s hard to argue that America is more racist now than 1984. So if the economic opportunity and ROI available to the average African American is less than or equal to what it was decades ago, doesn’t that suggest that the programs, and laws, and set-asides, and bureaus, and systems, and administrations we’ve implemented — in good faith, with the best of intentions — have utterly and completely failed?
http://ricochet.com/
