The gap between the wealth of white Americans and African Americans has grown. According to the Fed, for every dollar of wealth held by the typical white family, the African American family has only one dime. In 2004, it had 12 cents.That, really, is all you need to know about race in this country.
But the effect of past discrimination is observable and quite profound:
The biggest predictor of the future economic status of a child is the net worth of the child's parents. Even modest inheritances or gifts within a parent's lifetime -- such as paying for college or providing the down payment on a home -- can give a child a lift up the economic ladder. And historically, white families have enjoyed more government support and tax-paid subsidies for their asset-building activities.Let's look at the rules of the game in homeownership, for example.
During the Depression, the Home Owners' Loan Corp. was formed to rescue families whose homes were in foreclosure. Not a single loan went to a family of color. The black section of Detroit was simply excluded. After World War II, GIs received government-subsidized home mortgages, but there was no oversight to ensure that soldiers of color got their fair share. Of the 67,000 mortgages issued under the GI Bill in New York and northern New Jersey, 66,900 went to white veterans, as documented in Ira Katznelson's "When Affirmative Action Was White."
This says nothing of redlining--a federal government policy which was, at its root, designed to keep black people in certain neighborhoods, and keep those neighborhoods poor. This says nothing of the the South's efforts to destroy black middle class communities, and violently suppress anything resembling black economic power. I think reparations are politically unworkable, but its becoming clear that we're paying a price for taking the easy way out. As Malcolm would say, agreeing that we sit on the toilet next to each other should be the minimum, not the apex, of our efforts to set history right.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
I just hope this doesn't lead to a few marginal percentage point increase in the uppermost tax bracket. Because that would make things far worse. Or so the Have Even Mores would have us believe. Wankers.
I know from a city planning perspective, the federal policies of WWII and urban renewal really shaped the social economic dynamics of our cities and suburbs more than any other period. In fact those policies are still affecting us today over 50 years later.
What does the distribution look like?
I don't think MOST white families have a lot of wealth, and certainly not all that much when you divide it up on a per-child or per-grandchild basis for inheritence. Most people just have savings that get depleted during retirement, especially if serious illnesses and nursing home care are involved. If grandma lives to 95, she doesn't leave much behind. On the other hand, having the money for that is a big deal for descendants who might have to pay out of current income otherwise.
Nevertheless, I think the real issue is that most of the big accumulations of wealth belong to white families. (This is not the same as saying that most white families have such accumulations.) Those are so much bigger than what most people can amass that they have to skew the average for whites.
M.C. as far as white familes not leaving behind a lof ot wealth I think the problem with the example you are providing is that a lot of black families wouldnt even have the funds to take care of grandma until 95. A lot of familes would be in debt. So while one family may not have a lot of wealth after their relatives pass on, another family is in debt.
Your average white family holds roughly ten times as much economic power as your average black family.
I'd be careful with the maths here. The inequality is indeed huge, but if you compare medians rather than means i'd guess the ratio is going to be a fraction of that. The big inequality problem is the huge holdings of the top 1% or so (34% of total US personal net worth, vs 0.2% for the bottom 40%). Your comparison says basically that the US needs a few more black billionaires when i'm pretty sure that's not the problem you're addressing.
http://www.nber.org/~wbuiter/health.pdf slide 13 (actually the whole thing is great).
Does living next to Bill Gates make me less well off?
If you gave every African American family today $90,000 (and that's the average wealth gap if you can believe what NPR said this morning), do you think it would make any difference at all? Put another way, how much of that $90,000 would be saved and invested, and how much would be consumed? Only the part that is saved and invested would make any difference at all in the "net worth of the child's parents," to quote your source. What evidence can you provide that suggests that poor families, the ones that you claim suffer the worst effects from past discrimination, would do anything other than spend this money, just like lottery winners by and large do?
@Paul
Point taken. Correcting.
Your asking me to defend someone else's argument. Please re-read the post. No one in this thread has suggested that. If you have evidence to the contrary, I'd like to see it.
Paul just made the point that I was going to make -- that looking at the mean vs. the median is vital. I can believe that I (a white person) have more wealth than the average black person -- perhaps as much as 2x more. I certainly don't have 10x more, nor do 99% of the white people that I know.
The issue here is that Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Larry Ellison and so forth are all white. Those few individuals skew the average hugely. I don't get any more benefit from their wealth than the average black person does, so it makes no sense to include them in a general social comparison. The medians would be much more reflective of the *actual* inequality. I'm sure there would still be a fairly significant divergence between the two demographics -- perhaps 2x or 3x. But nowhere near 10x.
I'm not trying to dismiss or minimize the problem -- but overstating it can be counter-productive to the debate.
I'll also note that if you look at median levels of *net* wealth -- including debt -- then the picture may look very different. I make a pretty decent salary, but I have no savings, virtually no assets and am desperately trying to pay off massive amounts of credit card and student loan debts. All told, my net worth is probably in the neighborhood of negative $40,000. I'd wager that this is considerably *below* the median net worth of the average black person, who is often not given the opportunity to so thoroughly debase their net worth.
In all fairness, someone should examine the working and spending habits of these extremes. I believe there is a lot more to it than simple racial bias.
I think M.C. has effectively grasped the most significant concept in this ever-so hazy topic. Wealth is accumulated. Accumulation is a function of two things, time and opportunity. The problem with comparing with Italians/Irish is that, the time difference is so significant. They got it good for a limited period of time, but then they where accepted. I have a bit of a problem with people creating false-equivalencies between immigrant (white irish, italians etc) groups and basically non-immigrant groups (African Americans, to some extent Indians) as a way of saying "well, we did it, why can't you". It sets up an ugly differential-analysis that ultimately leads to the so-called "cultural" arguments that folks on the right so much enjoys having. Finally, once again I have to revert back to Chris Rock.
"Shaq's Rich, the mufacka who pays him...is wealthy!"
...Aaaaaand by the time I get done typing my first post, you've addressed the point already. :-)
It's been done. Read Dalton Conley's book--he tackles that argument pretty effectively.
http://www.amazon.com/Being-Black-Living-Red-America/dp/0520216733
Also check out this piece by Virginia Postrel.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/consumption
There isn't much evidence that spending habits account for the wealth gap. There is a considerable evidence that history does.
@Nathan
It's fine. It's why I have commenters. They make me better.
When you don't go to school and don't know who your daddy is, the wealth gap is where it should be. Start living a good moral life for a change and do the right things for the right reasons and quit making excuses for failure. To solve the the wealth gap... go to school and get a skill, work hard and take personal responsibility for your life..wealth redistribution just urges low life bgavior
My point was the same as Paul's and Nathan's -- the extreme skews the average quite a bit.
Most families of all races are basically lower middle class. While there are some wealth differences there, the lifestyles of people making lower middle class incomes don't seem to vary all that much by race. Most of the variation seems to be by age, with everyone starting basically broke and working their way up.
What messes up the accounting is that the very rich tend to be white (and sometimes Asian), while the very poor tend to be black and Hispanic. And it's the rich end where you have a very small number of people who have so much money that they can move the average by a lot.
How do you legislate equality? Social welfare policies of the past may have lifted white families up and/or suppressed the economic mobility of black families, but you're citing policies that are fifty years old. I'm grateful you pointed out that reparations are unworkable (the same way the Tower of Babel was unworkable). Perhaps the only policies that will improve the lot of poor black families will - by necessity, if not design - have to benefit everyone else as well and the only way black families will be able to close the wealth gap is to see themselves as simply poor Americans and not poor black Americans.
Not really. If this were the case then you wouldn't see a wealth gap among black and white families of the same income. But...
That's from a piece by Conley in The Nation. He expounds on this a lot more in his book, which I linked above. It's true that there isn't a consistent 10 to 1 ratio--I was wrong to say that. But 2 to 1 among the middle class, is damage enough. The wealth-gap is persistent across incomes. It's the reason it makes little sense to compare black and white families while controlling only for income. To be working class and black isn't the same as being working class and white.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010326/conley
Funny how it goes. Just this AM I am working on an "Entrepreneur's Biography" and thinking about the interplay of the advantages and opportunities that I got, and the bets I made to cobble my life together.
My parents are second and third generation immigrants. My father and his brothers are the first generation in their line to go to college. My mother is second generation and the first woman in her family. No multigenerational history of family wealth.
Even still, it's not hard to connect the dots; the small inheritance from my mom's spinster aunt that let my folks make a down payment on a house; my getting out of school almost debt free because my dad went to med school (and spent the next 20 years paying off his school loans.)
The social networking/capital thing is also huge. I got a big leg up from my parents, but as I've gone down the line, the leg up I've gotten from folks not hemmed in by the immigrant mentality has been just as important. I don't mean that as a knock on my parent at all. It's just a fact. Seeing the world of possibilities beyond your own experience, and seeing that you might have a place in that world is huge.
I'm not saying I didn't work hard and take risks, because I did nd I do. But Megan might say, it's marginal; an extra couple percent advantage, compounded through the years, and then compounded from generation to generation.
(Evidently we have multiple Nathans on this post. I was the first two; somebody else was the third. I'll use my initial from here on out.)
Out of curiosity, I did a bit of digging, and found this paper, which seems to indicate that the 10-to-1 ratio is the median:
www.southern.org/pubs/pubs_pdfs/pp0402_wealth.pdf
I have reasons to believe that they are cherry-picking the data, or even misusing the term "median", but I don't have time to adequately investigate this. It simply doesn't gel with my personal experience. I've generally lived in middle-class white communities, but have spent time in poor black urban communities in South. Yet for that 10x factor to be correct, I must have been hanging out with some of the country's poorest whites and wealthiest blacks. I just can't believe that.
(I can quite easily believe their statistic that there is a 62% gap between median incomes - that certainly does gel with my experience.)
I'll also note that a quick Googling of "median net wealth in America" (and various permutations thereof) yields figures ranging from negative $8,000 to positve $86,000. With statistics like that to choose from, it ought to be possible to prove almost any point one chooses.
I'm sure this is true, but I'm not sure how much the difference is economic vs. cultural and geographic. Growing up poor and white, for me, meant raiding dumpsters for food and sometimes living without gas or electricity. But it didn't mean fending off social pressure from gangs, or living in a ghettoized area, which would have made things considerably harder. So I'm sure the experience was very different, but I don't know if income levels are a good reflection of that.
The gap is the result of an
all of the above option. Looking at both my family and my wife's family there is generational wealth that has supported us (in the form of education money and emergency medical and disability support) that is the result of racist Farm Bureau policy in the form of emergency loans and home mortgages in the 30's that were not offered to African Americans, to buying property in Palos Verdes in the 50's, which was not an option to minorities, to being able to get a job at Goldman Sachs as a clerk during the 30's as a result of a family connection. That position was leveraged into an engineering degree, and from that a career at Hughes and TRW,both of which were weak on hiring minorities for positions above janitor.
Of course, my kidney disease is destroying the rest of it. I hope my brother strikes it rich in academia.
Again, I'd check out Conley's work. He's a sociologist at NYU, and a brilliant dude. His evidence is quite compelling
This is a very interesting example. It neither a geographic or cultural mistake that black people live where they live. A significant part of the reason that being white and poor did not "mean fending off social pressure from gangs, or living in a ghettoized area" is because of state and federal government policy.
The Great Migration was fueled, not just by the burgeoning industries in the North, but by black people who were fleeing racial terrorism. Read up on the race riots, and what you see is that they invaribaly targeted wealthy and middle class black communities. These efforts were effectively aided and abetted by state and local government.
Once blacks come north they found themselves in cities, and because of federal policy, they often found themselves trapped. Redlining was created by the government. The racial terrorism of Dixie was aided, or at least ignored, by state and local government. Both had, as their goal, the diminishing of black wealth, which they accomplished.
It was, effectively, the policy of this government to stem the growth of black wealth and encourage the growth of white wealth. We can not evade that fact because it makes people uncomfortable, or because it isn't PC. It's painful to admit this, but the facts are quite clear.
As a sidenote, I'd suggest reading Nic Lehman's The Promised Land and Kenneth Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier. People seem to think these things happen by accident. I'm not a conspiracy nut. But policy matters.
I'm unconvinced that redlining and past discrimination explains things. Or wealth, for that matter.
The reason is the following: take a later starting point. Compare black americans at that point to other groups with the same (or worse) starting point. As of 1980, vietnamese americans had it far worse than black americans. Discrimination was probably comparable, wealth was lower, and there was a language barrier.
Yet somehow, in spite of all this, vietnamese americans have achieved wealth parity while black americans have not. There are other examples as well, the vietnamese example is just a convenient one. If you want to blame discrimination, also compare native black americans to foreign born black americans.
I don't see how you can pin this on history, considering that other groups have overcome history (and quite quickly).
Deleted. You don't have to agree with me. But you need to be serious. Find another site please.
Please don't do this. No one should have to respond to broad generalities which aren't backed by any evidence. We live in the age of hyperlinks. If you aren't going to bring any evidence, then you shouldn't be expected to be taken seriously. If you aren't expecting to be taken seriously, then I won't take you seriously, and you'll be deleted.
This is a serious conversation about serious things. The people reading this deserve better than that comment. They deserve some intellectual honesty. If you don't want to do that, please don't comment.
Hey, was the content of my previous post offensive? If so I'd really like to know where I went wrong, as it wasn't meant to be and I didn't think it was? You mentioned I need to be serious...I thought I was asking serious and non-racist, but possibly sensitive questions. What gives? I've seen much much worse?
History takes a lion's share of the blame, which is not the same as "pinning it all on history." Historically, native born minority groups have also had plenty of time to absorb harmful stereotypes that more recent immigrant populations have not (see your example of native-born vs foreign-born blacks). This doesn't discount the fact that these internalized stereotypes were the RESULT of that history.
Just a short follow-up... I think you might have deleted the wrong comment. Or if you meant to delete mine I'd like to know where I went wrong, because I didn't think I said anything bad...surely something that could be misconstrued to be whatever... but half the stuff if not more on this blog could be misconstrued unfairly.
@sam
For starters, you made an apples and oranges comparison which just isn't what the conversation is about. No one is denying that various immigrant groups had it rough when they first got to America. It's just not the point that is being made here and you cannot compare a group of people who came to America of their own free will with the experiences of a group of people who did not. Follow that up with being enslaved for hundreds of years and then institutional racism from every level of government and you have a set of circumstances that no immigrant group had to overcome.
If you're going to make a cultural outlook argument--or any argument--you need evidence. That's all I ask. I may have deleted your comment in haste. For that I apologize.
I accept the point about disaggregating by income, but I don't think it goes nearly far enough.
Let's start with people making $15,000. I accept that someone who makes that income year after year during working life will probably have a net worth of zero, or perhaps a negative one. It's nearly impossible to save at that level, and one would expect any savings to get wiped out periodically by minor health issues or repair needs. And chances are the parents didn't do much better, and had little to leave their kids.
People who live that way are disproportionately likely to belong to certain minority groups. That's also beyond dispute. You will find some white people in that group, though. In some northerly, rural parts of the country, the majority of people in that group may be white.
But who else earns $15,000 a year? Well, perhaps a graduate student with a trust fund that produces that much in interest every year. Or someone who has made much more in the past, but who is living off savings and occasional temp jobs while writing a book. Or someone with a business start-up who didn't start taking a salary till last November. Obviously, these people are likely to make a lot more money at other points in life. And their assets are probably way over $10,000, and perhaps way over $100,000.
It only takes a few to shift the average.
I don't think you can get at this issue with a snapshot. Well, maybe a wealth comparison at 65 vs. lifetime earnings through 65. But ultimately I think you've got to look at how much wealth actually transfers intergenerationally, whether through inheritance or tuition paid or whatever. And at exactly who gets it.
If it helps, my argument actually assumes there is even more wealth inequality than the assumption that wealth distribution in the white population is a bell curve.
The second Nathan asks, how do you legislate equality?
As an educator, the best that I have read on this is Jean Anyon's "Radical Possibilities: Public Policy, Urban Education, and a New Social Movement." She uses a whole lot of data to make the case that: 1) income/wealth have a big impact on kids educational options, and 2) local and federal government have a big impact on individual's income/wealth.
I live in Harlem (but have never met TNC) and taught in the South Bronx. I always think about the total isolation of my kids' lives, caused by transportation policies (see South Bronx Expressway) and housing policies that did so much to create a depressed, segregated area. The networks that lead to wealth accumulation don't seem to exist the same way they do elsewhere.
I'm not being very articulate, need to work on this argument. But I recommend Anyon's work wholeheartedly.
People who live that way are disproportionately likely to belong to certain minority groups. That's also beyond dispute. You will find some white people in that group, though. In some northerly, rural parts of the country, the majority of people in that group may be white
A fair argument, though most of those people (the legitimately poor ones) still aren't going to be black--they're just going to be a disproportionately large share of them who are. But more to your point, Conley (as I quoted) does the same for the middle class, both black and white. The wealth gap is still present--that's where the 2-1 advantage actually is, among families earning $40,000.
Huh... well I wasn't excusing people who said "history plays a role". I said people would respond that there were 400 years of slavery and that's pretty different than some Vietnamese guys just showing up. And then I said it is different.
But my real question is, and I think its relevant and I'd like to know if anyone has any reading material or seen information on...
An academic approach to assimilation and social ladder climbing experiences to various groups. What works and what does.
Clearly it "works" not to have your ancestors enslaved for 400 years. But is there something the black community is not doing that it could be? If this is getting into offensive territory, I apologize in advance as I'm just trying to take a "What can we do to do better" approach.
Maybe there is nothing, and maybe all that needs to be done is structural changes with society. But I don't think that is going to happen.
So it would be good if we wanted to fix whatever problem we're looking at to see specifically what has worked in the past, and if it can be applied in this case.
Did Vietnamese do well by focusing on serving their tightly knit communities? (Generally they hire their own, shop at their own where possible, etc). Is it just a cultural sense of sacrifice? I dunno, but I guess I'll start googling "assimilation techniques culture" or something like later today.
On this and your subsequent points, I wholeheartedly agree. I hope that I wasn't coming across as an apologist for the status quo: the overall inequalities between blacks and whites are nasty situation, and they're the result of many persistent, pernicious, and intentional social and governmental policies. You'll get no argument from me there.
This raises a tough issue for me. Personally, I've always favored color-blind economic and class-based balancing mechanisms (such as strongly progressive taxation, scholarships based solely on income, etc), rather than race-based mechanisms. This is because race-based mechanisms -- while corrective in the overall statistical sense -- can create many individual inequalities which can lead to further problems. I have seen many of my lower-class white friends work full-time jobs to pay for college, for example, among middle-class black classmates who are generously funded by race-based scholarships. I'm not saying that this is a widespread phenomena -- and I get the underlying reason for it -- but up close and personal, it can be pretty ugly. I have fine friends, but in a lessor group of people, it might have lent legitimacy to creeping racist attitudes.
So, as I said, I've always favored purely class-based and economic-based corrective mechanisms, to avoid exactly this problem. However the social and geographic problems that we're talking about are somewhat independent of the economic factors. If they were not caused solely by economic factors, then perhaps it's naive to hope that economic corrective mechanisms alone will be able to resolve those problems.
I'll certainly check out Conley's work when I can get the chance. Thanks for the pointer.
Not at all.
I don't really have a problem with this, and it's probably the best solution. The fact is that any class-based policy will disproportionally benefit black people anyway (since the poor are disproportionately black) and do a lot of good toward healing old wounds.
On this issue as well as others aired here, it stikes me that solutions are where we ought to be headed. The two areas that seem to be most important are education and jobs. Obama's recent hire of Van Jones as Green Energy Czar who makes the connection of environment, jobs, racism, and poverty is exhilerating:
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=2431
TNC: "Please don't do this. No one should have to respond to broad generalities which aren't backed by any evidence. We live in the age of hyperlinks."
I thought this was well known. But here goes anyway:
Vietnamese americans: median family income, $46,929
Poverty rate: 14.3%
http://www.ncvaonline.org/archive/census_socioeconomic_2000.shtml
Black americans: median household income: $30,439.
Poverty rate: 22.1%.
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=677
Do you want me to try to find a source estimating the average wealth and hardship of vietnamese refugees? Or are you willing to accept as obvious the fact that a communist country (formerly a war zone) was probably a worse place to live than most predominantly black american areas?
Comparing american blacks to foreign-born blacks:
5% unemployment for foreign blacks:
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/forbrn.t01.htm
12-13% unemployment for american blacks:
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/work.t04.htm
Seriously, google exists.
Deleted.
I think the disparity between the mean income and the median income highlights the wage income gap (across all population groups) better than anything else out there.
But more to your point, Conley (as I quoted) does the same for the middle class, both black and white. The wealth gap is still present--that's where the 2-1 advantage actually is, among families earning $40,000.
Like what you quoted in the original post, one thing I have noticed among my tax clients, many of whom are middle class is that they don't have a ton of assets as they work and go through life, but then a parent dies and leaves them with a house worth $250,000 with no mortgage. Split that up with another sibling or two and the net worth of the person has skyrocketed, perhaps doubling or more. Since the greatest single asset of the majority of people is their home, this is what creates a level of wealth for the middle or upper middle class.
If you have a group like african americans who have historically been shut out of the housing market, or forced into housing markets that lack long term appreciation (like living in the City of Detroit), then many are missing out on the one thing that will most easily, but slowly build wealth.
I know given the current situation, some have been scornful of home ownership, but it really has been a good way for many to build a degree of wealth so long as they don't use the home as an atm by constantly tapping equity.
Wow, TNC. Your claims are irrefutable.
At least irrefutable here, what with your tendency to delete all comments refuting them.
I didn't see the deleted post, but to Ninja Zombie, who I assume has been making follow-ups regarding the demand for info: you were making quantitative claims about Vietnamese immigrants vs. Black non-immigrant Americans. Given that this blog post is based on a specific study, if you're going to make a counter-claim that specific, you should be able to provide *some* basis for it so others can discuss productively. Assertions aren't going to move the ball forward.
There are probably ten important reasons that explain the wealth gap and another one hundred reasons to fully explore it. If you want a simple explanation turn on talk radio and listen to Limbaugh. Simple explanations for complex phenomena are about as useful as tits on a bull.
Racism, Jim Crow, the legacy of slavery, substandard schools,disproportionately living in areas of the midwest and northeast that have seen less than average price appreciation,the loss of industry etc all play a role. Culture plays a role too, but how to quantify the role of culture in the gap is beyond me.
You don't have to go that far back to see real efforts to exclude blacks from many industries. During the 80's some trade unions in Chicago moved some of their training facilities out of the city proper when the newly elected Mayor, Harold Washington, insisted blacks get a share of the training slots. Those may be considered "working class" gigs, but in good times they provide solid middle income salaries.
What's the solution?
Government incentives to put industry in inner cities would help. Ending the stupidity of the drug war would help.
I happen to like the idea of government vouchers to replace government schools. Let the free market reign.
Encouraging black small business ownership would help along with a few hundred other programs.
Reparations AINT gonna happen and as TNC stated probably the best way to address the gap is through "class based" programs and not race based programs.
Let me have a few drinks and I'll turn on talk radio and come back with a definitive five point plan to solve this issue by the end of 2010. Maybe sooner if I have some Guinness.
Something occurs to me. Part of the statistical problem is a basic methodological error - aggregating all white together into one category.
If the question is simply to compare white wealth to black wealth, that is an apples-to-oranges comaprison. And apples to apples comparison might be to compare specific groups - people with white sharecropper ancestors and black sharecropper ancestors, and something a quite a bit more ssophisticated than Sowell's "black redneck" trope. Has this been done?
This is the basic flaw in comparing random immigrant groups with random native groups. "immigrant" is not a valid category for anything other than immgiration law. a lot of Vietnamese coming in the 70's were emigre's rahter than immigrnats - they came with all kinds of mangerail and political skills and a self-image that was based on running a society. Those are not assets that any immigrant fgroup has, much less a lot of native groups.
Following up on farmgirl, a few points:
1.) Among social scientists, and anyone who follows these sorts of debates, the immigrant vs. African-American argument is one commonly seen. It's wrong for an obvious reason--immigrants are self-selecting. They are, by their very nature, the most ambitious, the most opportunistic, and (sometimes) the most educated of their lot. Comparing native population, white or black, to a group who came here specifically to seek opportunity, is problematic. This goes for non-native African-Americans also. For more on this read Malcolm Gladwell's piece on native African-Americans and immigrant African-Americans.
2.) The immigrant critique still doesn't answer the claim. Here's what you argued:
Your offering an answer to a question that hasn't been asked. Asserting that the Vietnamese overcame a lot, doen't get you to black people not suffering from past discrimination. It simply means--if we buy your frame--that the Vietnamese overcame a lot, and blacks didn't. But that still doesn't mean that the wealth gap isn't the result of Jim Crow. Put differently, the fact that the Vietnamese did well doesn't mean they don't hail from a war-zone.
My argument is simple--blacks have significantly less wealth because of past documented instances of Jim Crow, racial terrorism and redlining. If you're going to argue that that those things had no significant effect than you need some evidence and documentation. Please provide it.
As of 1980, vietnamese americans had it far worse than black americans. Discrimination was probably comparable, wealth was lower, and there was a language barrier.
With the understanding that data is not the plural of anecdote, I'm pretty certain that discrimination was not comparable. My mom used to do visa/asylum legal work for boat people refugees; church groups, pro-war groups, and various other conservative conglomerations were just coming out of the woodwork to slather the refugees with free housing, truckloads of groceries and clothes, free language lessons, low-interest business start-up loans, etc. And a lot of those refugees were educated professionals to start with -- once they learned enough English to pass the licensing tests their medical, engineering and accounting skills were fully transferable.
The donors got bored and moved on to some other cause within three or four years, but that was enough.
.
.
On a sidenote, the resistance here to a documented history, and to numbers is depressing but sobering. The fact that black people got screwed over doesn't mean your great grandfather didn't work hard. It feels like it's hard for us to hold both of those possibilities in our head. Either this country is the land of the free, or it's the home of the slaves. One or the other. Nothing else.
@Ninja Zombie
"Do you want me to try to find a source estimating the average wealth and hardship of vietnamese refugees? Or are you willing to accept as obvious the fact that a communist country (formerly a war zone) was probably a worse place to live than most predominantly black american areas?"
This actually goes against your argument. It may very well be more difficult to live in a communist country, but they don't live there anymore now do they? African American's still live in the place where we were enslaved and systematically discriminated against in everyway imaginable. If you want to compare us to other groups try groups of people who remained in the country in which they were enslaved, opressed, discriminated against, terrorized, etc. We didn't have the option of immigrating somewhere else, we had to stay and endure and fight a civil rights movement that other immigrants of color have benefitted from tremendously. Immigrants who do well here in the US wouldn't do well back home, but we are "back home". We never escaped the ills that plagued us unlike immigrants did. That is ultimately what makes the analogy of AA's to immigrants a false one.
For those who are interested, wealth follows a power law distribution. This was first published by Vilfredo Pareto in 1906 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilfredo_Pareto). The implications of this has been much discussed in many, many books and papers including some of my favorites like Talebs 'Black Swan', Mandelbrot's 'The (Mis)Behavior of Markets', and Barabsi's 'Linked'.
So what practical difference does wealth following a power law instead of a bell curve make? Lets assume that instead of height following a bell curve, your height was a function of your personal wealth. And further assume that the average height was 5'10''. The vast majority of people you see everyday would be very short, less than 3 feet tall say. However, you would every few weeks or so, see a 100 foot giant walking down the street. the tallest (richest) person in the world would be 8000 feet tall. (Example cribbed from Barabsi's Linked)
OMG, did I just get a shout-out from TNC? wheee!
but, if you want to know how the Vietnam war affected Vietnamese people's economic outlook, wouldn't it make sense to look at the wealth of the population that remained in Vietnam and compare that group's ability to accumulate post-war wealth to African American's ability to do so in the wake of a system like Jim Crow?
A black couple in suburban Chicago embark on campaign to buy black.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-buying-black-09-mar09,0,5889126.story
One telling thing about this story, is the distance these folks have to travel to shop at black owned businesses. Oak Park is a racially mixed working class to upper middle income suburb on Chicago's western border. In other words just to their east are hundreds of thousands of black folks and they travel all over the map to shop at black owned businesses.
I understand their desire to promote change, but perhaps they should open their own business nearby or bankroll some hard working individual who can open one. Traveling those distances to get a gallon of milk is silly.
it is kind of like going out of your way to buy organic, or driving across town to the farmer's market.
what's silly is that, even with so many black folk just to the east, they still have to drive 14 miles to be able to buy milk from a black-owned business.
@Irishpirate
I read the article and the comments from the article you posted and it was just as I assumed it would be. I'm not picking on you, but why do people assume that the experiment is racist? One letter to the couple stated that they would not support black suppliers or hire black employees because of the experiment. Huh? Immigrants do this all the time to accumulate wealth and no one say one word. Black people do it and it's racist.
To your question, I just think they want to bring attention to the issue so it can be discussed. Also, most black people don't start businesses for the same reasons stated in TNC's post. If you think historical lending practices don't affect business loans, then you are naive.
TNC: "My argument is simple--blacks have significantly less wealth because of past documented instances of Jim Crow, racial terrorism and redlining. If you're going to argue that that those things had no significant effect than you need some evidence and documentation. Please provide it. "
My claim is that Jim Crow et al might explain blacks economic position circa 1980. However, it does not explain why, between 1980 and 2000, vietnamese immigrants overcame this disadvantage while black americans did not.
To more precisely state my disagreement, I believe your explanation is incomplete. It explains why black americans were poorer as of the end of Jim Crow. It does not explain why those disadvantages persisted for decades after that.
I.e., your hypothesis explains 1980 given conditions in 1940. It does not explain 2009 given conditions in 1980.
Do you want me to try to find a source estimating the average wealth and hardship of vietnamese refugees?
On immigrants, I think there is massive selection bias when it comes to voluntary immigration. We are only getting the people who are willing to uproot their lives and move to a foreign country. We are getting the more motivated parts of that country in this way, not a random selection of Vietnamese. Take thousands of random Vietnamese enslave them for a at least a few generations and then discriminate against them for a few more generations you'll have far worse results.
TNC, you say:
"My argument is simple--blacks have significantly less wealth because of past documented instances of Jim Crow, racial terrorism and redlining. If you're going to argue that that those things had no significant effect than you need some evidence and documentation. Please provide it."
But what is your evidence for that claim? The data you've referenced in the original post, and from Conley, demonstrate correlation between being black and having less wealth than average. But correlation does not in the least suggest that being black leads to less wealth, that it causes it.
If we tracked the appropriate data, we might find, hypothetically speaking, that people with brown eyes have significantly lower net worths than people with blue eyes. Does that allow a reasonable person to conclude that people with brown eyes have been systematically discriminated against? What if we found that people who wear red socks tend to be poorer? Would one be more likely to be richer if they took off their red socks?
This is explained quite well in the article I linked:
Pointing out that an immigrant group, who never suffered any oppression here, were able to do quite well isn't a counter. It simply says that they were very successful. Good for them. But it remains true that, by and large, if your parents--regardless of race--had no wealth in 1980, you probably won't have much either. That you can only cite an immigrant groups--people whose oppression was not suffered here--as the exception, says a lot.
Black people, in this country, were prevented for decades from getting wealth. Ending that policy doesn't in the effects, anymore than stopping a guy from being stabbed for the fifth prevents him from bleeding from the other four stab wounds.
I don't assume the black buying black experiment is racist. I understand the desire of that wealthy couple to help others in the black community. I've hired younger relatives to help me with some landscaping not because they were great landscapers, but because they needed the money and were related to me.
I think it is "silly" to travel those distances for a gallon of milk. Why not address the issue by helping other hard working blacks, I imagine there are a few such folks out there, open a business closer to home? As TNC might say it is possible to walk and chew gum at the same time. Patronize black businesses and help create black owned businesses closer to home.
As for the nature of the comments on the Tribune story don't underestimate white stupidity or better yet human stupidity. The amount of bitterness in this country amazes me. I imagine it is just part of the human condition. I know a woman, friend of a relative, who always whines that the black and the mexicans are taking all the good jobs from white people. She doesn't seem to recall that both she and virtually her entire extended family have solid middle incomes from working for the City of Chicago.
People are not particularly self reflective or thoughtful. Race is as what put so well long ago: "The American Dilemma".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Dilemma
texascowgirl: "This actually goes against your argument. It may very well be more difficult to live in a communist country, but they don't live there anymore now do they?...We never escaped the ills that plagued us unlike immigrants did. That is ultimately what makes the analogy of AA's to immigrants a false one. "
My point is this. Slavery was over as of 1865 or so, Jim Crow as of 1965. This caused black americans to have low household wealth as of 1980. I dispute none of this.
I dispute the hypothesis that low household wealth 15 years after jim crow necessarily leads to poor economic indicators today. Vietnamese immigrants suffered from low wealth as well, as did other groups. Black americans have not overcome this disadvantage, whereas other groups have (more or less).
THAT fact (which is crucial to economic conditions today) is is not explained by the low household wealth hypothesis, and therefore other explanations are needed.
Here's evidence that being black leads to less wealth -- explicitly, measurably, causes it.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/moneymag_archive/1989/12/01/85518/index.htm
It doesn't happen by coincidence.
.
.
Ninja Zombie,
I'll state the obvious: time did not restart at zero in 1980, even if that's when Vietnamese refugees arrived in this country.
I'm not sure why you included stats about American v. foreign-born blacks. Don't they prove TNC's point?
@ninja zombie
you're still comparing a native born experience to an immigrant experience.
if you want to do that, compare the post-war wealth of vietnamese citizens to that of vietnamese immigrants to the US. Is there more wealth or less among those who left the country's oppresive tactics behind?
is there more poverty or less among the people who stayed and continued to live with the devastation in the wake of the war?
@wendy: appreciate the link, but I don't think it proves what you suggest. It only further establishes that black people are on average poorer than white people. But the 'why' is all theorizing. Some of the theories may be compelling, but none prove that if you separated the groups using different criteria -- people with three or more dental fillings vs. people with less; people with b blood types vs. people with other blood types; people whose mothers had 5 sexual partners or fewer at the time of their birth vs. people whose mothers had 10 or more; or any other arbitrary separation -- that you wouldn't find meaningful differences -- indeed perhaps differences that seem to be even more meaningful than white vs. black -- in wealth distribution.
The problem is, we track race data, but we don't track other arbitrary categories that we could use to separate groups of people. So we get data to support claims that race matters, absent of data to suggest that other equally arbitrary divisions do as much or more. Having data about one thing doesn't make it more true, though. It's just that we're able to theorize about it more easily.
Ninja,
The Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968--redlining was legal until then. Cases were being litigated into the 70s. In other words, if you were 22 in 1980, your parents and grandparents would have been subject to redlining. If you were born in in 1980, and you're 29 now, your grandparents would have been victims. Are you honestly arguing that had little impact on wealth accumulation? How could that possibly be true?
I don't think you are being honest. I think there's a lot of room to debate about what to do about wealthy. But people who doubt the why or think redlining is "theorizing" should stop talking, and start reading. The ignorance is stunning. It's flat-earthism married to race. Incredible.
TNC: "But it remains true that, by and large, if your parents--regardless of race--had no wealth in 1980, you probably won't have much either."
That's my point: it isn't true regardless of race. If it were true regardless of race et al (note: "et al" includes other factors than race, e.g. culture, etc), then vietnamese immigrants should have the same wealth levels as african americans.
Your explanation says that wealth is the major factor. I've provided an example with wealth held constant, but different outcomes. This shows that wealth provides an incomplete explanation.
Do you want to amend your hypothesis? Change it to "Low wealth in 1980 + memory of discrimination -> low wealth today." Vietnamese immigration is not a counterexample to this hypothesis. It is a counterexample to your original one.
TNC: "Ending that policy doesn't in the effects, anymore than stopping a guy from being stabbed for the fifth prevents him from bleeding from the other four stab wounds."
My point is this: one guy has 4 stab wounds. He has only 50% recovered.
Hypothesis: 4 stab wounds -> 50% recovery.
Fact 2: another guy with 4 stab wounds has 90% recovered.
Conclusion: original hypothesis is wrong. You need to do more than just count stab wounds, perhaps looking at width of the blade, location of wounds, physical condition before being stabbed, etc.
I'll leave it at that. The arguments are laid out. People can decide which holds more water.
In my opinion, there are a variety of reasons for the current black economic situation today:
1. Past policies that prevented black capital accumulation, education, health, housing, and rights.
2. Present-day remnants of those past policies that continue to prevent social advancement (e.g., lack of access to jobs, housing, education, role models, mentors, networks).
3. Cultural backlash against white norms (e.g., studying is acting white).
4. Disintegration of the black family.
5. The stigma that blacks can't achieve in education leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy (e.g., studies by Stanford psychologist Claude Steele shows that black college students who weren't labeled as "minorities" needing special tutoring did better on tests than black students who received special minority treatment and tutoring).
TNC: "If you were born in in 1980, and you're 29 now, your grandparents would have been victims. Are you honestly arguing that had little impact on wealth accumulation? How could that possibly be true?"
I never made this argument. In fact, in the very post I made (which you quoted), I explicitly said that I am not making this argument:
"My point is this. Slavery was over as of 1865 or so, Jim Crow as of 1965. This caused black americans to have low household wealth as of 1980. I dispute none of this."
The part of your argument which I disagree with is that low wealth in 1980 (or some similar initial condition) is predominantly responsible for poor economic performance today.
Fascinating.
Generational wealth gaps among people of different groups/races/classes are as real as the nose on my face. The poorest county in the United States is the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.Wounded Knee anyone?
I don't mean to thread-jack so I won't but TNC's post and the replies to the post leave out an interesting part of this discussion that in my opinion needs to be adressed.
Wealth creation isn't just generational its also institutional. Insitutions create wealth for communities over generations in the same way that government programs do and for the same reasons. The devestating effects of slavery and Jim Crow aren't just measured in terms of individual wealth but also in terms of the colleges, universities, and other institutions that create generational wealth.
From The farmer's cooperatives of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Elks club, the Masonic Lodge, for Catholics the Knights of Columbus, to the colleges that were founded by excluded groups in this country, African Americans, Native Americans, and others, who were around before the demise of jim crow and the formal barriers to insitutions that have created generational wealth, have suffered immesurably. Catholic immigrants managed to bypass more of the harm from this massive exclusion from these institutions because the Church in America was able to set up its own institutions and social clubs that led to wealth creation. Other minorities weren't so lucky.
Compare a list of catholic colleges and universities in the united states with a list of Historically Black Colleges and Universities and you will see that the "wealth gap" isn't only a matter of individual wealth but also of insitutional wealth.
In my opinion redistributive ecconomics may fix the individual part of the wealth gap. However the institutional wealth gap in terms of the associations and organizations that contribute to long term wealth creation is much more severe. The systematic racism of the past 200 years matters a great deal; however, we do ourselves an injustice when we look at the effects of the wealth gap soley on an individual level. People aren't poor simply because they lack the individual assets to achieve upward mobility, but also because they lack the collective assets that foster and sustain the creation of wealth in the long term.
Perhaps, but what about the mid-80s and early 90's? just because redlining was outlawed in 1968 doesn't mean it didn't go on. See here:
http://powerreporting.com/color/
or even here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
The links provide evidence of housing discrimination and other types that correlates a little too strongly to be a function of simple coincidence. "Redlining" could also apply to things like business loans, insurance plans, even retail markets, where lower-income grocery stores provide less choice and higher prices.
A living example: I live in Central Harlem with many young professionals and many poor folks of Black and Latino descent. I've always shopped at C-Town next to my building; it's a small grocery store but is full service (with produce, etc.)
So one day I figured I'd venture across town to the PathMark located in the more upscale part of Harlem near Lexington Av/125th St. I was really shocked not only at the variety, but the price differences were far lower compared to C-Town.
So maaybe its a few points on a mortgage here, and higher credit card rate there..a higher insurance premium here, and better grocery prices there. It's the little micro-inequities that make a huge difference, especially year after year.
Re: Vietnamese versus African Americans:
Actually, it’s not safe to simply assume that growing up in an inner city has less-severe effects than growing up in a war zone. Studies have been conducted showing that children from war zones are somewhat bolstered (not by huge amounts, but somewhat) by the idea that the random violence of war is not a normal state and will someday end when enemies are defeated. In an inner city, enemies aren’t so clear, and random violence can seem like the natural state of things.
Here’s one link, but a bit jargony. However, Joy D. Osofsky has written a book on the subject entitled ‘Children in a Violent Society.’
Further, once the Vietnamese reach the U.S., there is the benefit of the “model minority” issue, a stereotype which, while it can have some very detrimental effects on individuals, is not so detrimental when it comes to things like applying for a home or business loan.
I gotta say, the whole comparison seems pretty random to me, though. (Granted, I keep coming in late. Drat that multitasking...)
Just keep that in mind the next time somebody says "But if you stick it to the +250Kers, it'll have negative effect on small business and job creation" ;-)
Another story on the social/institutional thing:
As I said, my mom got a small inheritance from a spinster aunt and that's how my folks were able to put a down payment on a house. My mom's brother, the uncle I've mentioned a few time also got some money.
At the time (early 70s), he could have put a down payment on a co-op in Lincoln towers, but co-ops for the middle class was a very new idea in NYC. Everyone he knew rented, and In his mind, co-ops were for rich people, so he didn't pursue the Lincoln tower co-ops. If he had, his return on investment would have been monstrous. But he doesn't get how that game is played, so he put his money in the bank.
A few years later he got a job as a writer in the promotion department at a Time Inc. magazine. Once he was a Time Inc, he started meeting folks who had weekend houses. Again, "weekend" houses seems like something for the wealthy, not for a middle class employee. But one day he hears a woman who he knows makes about the same as he does talking about going to her "house in the Hamptons".
"How can you afford that?" he asks; and she lays it all out for him.
"Stop spending your paycheck on dinners out and you can afford a house if you want one."
Fortunately he's still got the inheritance in the bank, so he's got a down payment, and viola -- he's building wealth.
A little inheritance; a little knowledge through exposure to someone with a little more sophistication; marginal difference compounding marginal difference. Money, access, knowledge; these things matter.
Ninja, I think I agree with you. Take two groups, who had nothing in terms of wealth in 1980, look at them in 2009, and if they have different levels of wealth, it must have been something different than the level of wealth in 1980. Something like... the cultural and educational wealth they had, the wealth of their institutions, the help or hindrance they got from other groups, the help or hindrance that they got from the government, etc., etc. Examples of how the black experience differs from the Vietnamese experience in these respects have been outlined above by lots of people. So: dissimilarities in wealth in 1980 cannot explain the current difference in wealth between blacks and all other groups, just some of them. So what? It doesn't mean wealth doesn't have profound effects, which are interesting and worth talking about.
Why is there a wealth gap?
How about the foundation for the current generation of wealth in this country was based on the G.I. Bill?
And, how about there was systematic discrimination against Blacks when it came to the GI Bill?
How about Redlining? If you have entire communities that aren't allowed to get a loan so that they can OWN a home so that it becomes an ASSET that can grow for the family....
How about the systematic lockout of Blacks from Financial Services? Please tell me where Black folk were able to invest in the stock market during the 40's, 50's, 60's, so that they could build the nest egg that could help their children?
THIS was race.
IF you couldn't buy a house in the North, let alone the South, even though you were ENTITLED because of the G.I. Bill.
IF you couldn't go to a local university and use the G.I.Bill because they didn't let in Black folks.
IF you lived in a community that was REDLINED, and couldn't buy that basic asset that greww.
IF you couldn't invest your money into assets that would grow for you (the stock market), because they refused to service you because you are Black..
IF you couldn't get into the Police and Fire Department because they wouldn't let in Black folk.
IF you can't get into LABOR Unions (I'm talking about Construction), because you're being kept out. I don't know about how it is in NYC, but in Chicago, there was one place were all the Trade Unionists went to high school: Washburne, I believe. They kept Black folks out of it. And, by the time they actually let Black folks into the school, it was so run down, it was disgraceful. Harold Washington is elected Mayor, declares that Black folks should be let into those Trade Unions. What do they do? They CLOSE DOWN THE SCHOOL AND MOVE IT TO THE LILY WHITE SUBURBS.
Race is EVERYWHERE in that wealth gap disparity.
Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (Hardcover)
by Beryl Satter (Author)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/080507676X/ref=pd_luc_mri?%5Fencoding=UTF8&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&v=glance
The issue here is that Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Larry Ellison and so forth are all white. Those few individuals skew the average hugely. I don't get any more benefit from their wealth than the average black person does, so it makes no sense to include them in a general social comparison.
Yes it does make perfect sense. If exceptional wealth is denied to blacks because of their race you're covering it up by saying common white folks don't get exceptional wealth. I say, "so what?" If exceptional wealth is conditional on being white, you damn well better reflect that.
I'll throw my two cents into this debate. When TNC recommended reading Crabgrass Frontier and The Promised Land, I wholeheartedly agree. For anyone who is unclear on the very large role federal and state governments played in maintaining and exacerbating residential segregation, these two books will enlighten you. I would also recommend American Aparthied by Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton (1993). Seriously, I had to read the literature on residential segregation for my comprehensive exams and it is incredibly depressing and rage-making.
The thing some people in this thread don't seem willing to understand is that the redlining and residential segregation *mandated* by the federal government from the 1910s through the late 1960s, effectively shut black families off from the largest avenue of wealth accumulation for middle class families in the twentieth century, housing appreciation.
As other people in this thread have mentioned before, wealth *accumulates* and is passed down from one generation to the next. When black families in the 1910s through the 1960s are shut out of the wealth generation of the housing market, they don't have the wealth to pass down to later generations (duh!).
This is, of course, to say nothing of the discrimination in the business lending market that kept many black entreprenuers from starting or growing businesses and the outright theft and destruction of black property that occurred throughout the South and Midwest from the 1870s through the 1950s. (It's kind of hard to pass a business or land on to your children if your own government will not recognize or protect your right to your own property. American Aparthied is also a good source of information on the race riots where white folks destroyed many black communities between 1870 and 1940.)
One thing that's particularly bothersome about some of the comments in this thread is that some people seem to assume that since the Fair Housing Act of 1968 that everything is all cool now and the connection between discrimination and the wealth gap is a thing of the past. No, it isn't.
The Fair Housing Act was followed up with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, and the Community Reinvestment Act in the 1970s in efforts to dismantle the widespread discrimination in the home buying and mortgage businesses.
And lo and behold, even into the 1990s, audits of mortgage lenders across the country find that black applicants are still more often denied mortgages or offered mortgages with worse terms than *similarly qualified* white applicants (Squires, 1994, Yinger, 1998) Yinger also details the many ways in which real estate agents continue to discriminate against black home buyers and renters. Also check out Orfield, 1996 for a very enlightening / maddening discussion of the connection between residential segregation and school segregation. So you see, the discrimination of the "past" that established and supported the wealth gap is alive and well today.
I actually agree with the thesis, but there is a strong counter-example in New Orleans, where black homeownership is fairly widespread, but so is poverty. In fact, the two often come together. Owning a home does not automatically lead to family prosperity. There must be more.
I often hear/see the phrase "the disintegration of the black family", but the black family in this country is still trying to re-form itself after centuries of slavery, during which time slave owners did everything they could to prevent the formation of families.
My wife and I have a young baby, and she's been a teacher in a variety of environments, so we often find ourselves reflecting on the wealth of knowledge and socialization we have to draw on that is too often missing in populations where slavery, apprenticeships, indentured service, or child labor meant that, historically, learning wasn't valued. And those populations tend to be the ones where poverty is most persistent.
I am a black female busines owner, college graduate who inherited no money or property and acquired wealth the old fashioned way....working my a.... off. The ghetto exists in your mind, I grew up in the Los Angeles area, one of ten kids, but my poor working parents emphasized work, and education. Believe it or not, I never heard my parents talk about how bad things were for black people or the white man is going to stop you from getting ahead. My mother encouraged my love of reading, and as result of all the books in the house, my siblings were readers too. My mother went to PTA meetings when she got off work as a $25 a week maid, and she signed and read our report cards. So I guess you can say, I inherited wealth that can not be foreclosed or go bankrupt...my wealth is the values, the strength, the philosophy my parents instilled in me and my siblings. Those are the values my siblings gave to their children which is why each generation we have gradutes from Stanford or the University of Michigan or Pitzer. The only thing holding you back is yourself, don't listen to people tell you how bad it is, or that you need money and connections to make it....
Yes, its racist in the country, we have a history of financial, social and educational racism that defines our cities, shapes and gives substance to the rich black culture yet as Rev. Wright would say, we still manage to produce Barack Obama's and Kobe Bryant's, Oprah, and Will Smith.. Its not easy being black in America but the chains were removed a long time ago, its up to us as Black Americans to remove the chains that encircle our psyche....