As I was surfing through the cable news channels the other night, I saw a video by the Women’s Law Center, whose fundamental message would do wonders for bringing greater economic equity to black Americans.
It's called “Women Are Not Worth Less.” It's on YouTube.
It's actually a very slick and effective presentation. In it, a young woman of European descent looks directly into the camera and makes the point that “Women are not worth less” (Please note, she doesn’t say “worthless,” but “worth less”). Her issue, of course, and that of the Law Center, is that, according to the most recent U.S. Census data, as of 2009, women earned 77 percent of what men earned. White women’s median annual income, according to that Census report, was cited at $36,276.
During the fast-paced presentation, you see the spokeswoman and other female actors holding large, bright-red signs in front of themselves that read: “23% less.” In one scene, the spokeswoman is shown standing back-to-back with a young white man and she says to him, sarcastically, over her shoulder: “You’re taller, maybe that’s why I make 23 percent less than you.” In another, she’s seen haggling with a fruit vendor on the sidewalk, trying to get a 23 percent discount on the purchase of an apple, because she earns less money. During morning rush hour, in another scene, she shouts out to female passers-by that she knows “It’s hard coming to work, when you make 23 percent less than a man does.”
At the close, the video encourages the U.S. Senate to move quickly to pass the “Paycheck Fairness Act,” which is designed to eliminate gender-based pay inequality and make it easier for women to file class-action suits against employers accused of sex-based pay discrimination. The bill was passed in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2008, but is still awaiting a positive vote in the Senate. President Obama, with much fanfare, called it a “common sense bill,” in July of this year.
Wow!
Hold up signs with “23 % less” splashed across them…get supportive statements from the President of the United States… do slick video/YouTube campaigns, putting pressure on the U.S. Senate…why can’t we do that?
I raise the question because there’s another piece of income inequality data in the most recent Census report, i.e.,that the median black household earned 59.8 percent as much as the median white household earned in 2009. That compares to 1975, when the median black household earned 59.6 cents for every dollar earned by the median white household.
That’s a two-tenths of one cent improvement over 35 years. Is that the great economic progress that so many of our national leaders--black and white--have said we should be so grateful for, in all of their public pronouncements about "black conditions" in America?
At that rate, it will take us 175 years to make up a whole penny in the black-white wage gap. At that rate, it will take us more than 7000 years to make up the 40.2 percent gap between black and white income levels, assuming that whites don’t continue to expand their absolute income, at all, over the period.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have 7,000 years to wait for income equity for black folks.
If white females feel justified in going to the House, the Senate, the President and, potentially, to the highest courts in the land to eliminate their wage gap, where’s our campaign? Where are our “40 % less” signs? Where is the Congressional vote in favor of wiping out the black-white pay disparity in this country, which has existed, at least, since the Constitution was signed in 1787?
We need to wake up and get off our backsides.
Even black people who have consistently been opposed to the concept of reparations “because none of the contemporary, mainstream institutions are currently engaged in, or were responsible for, slavery,” should understand that the concern about the black-white earnings disparity is not based on correcting some 150-year-old historical injustice. Rather, it's based on a current, daily and ongoing unfairness, traceable to the fact that some of us happen to be black.
And don’t fall for the tired old rhetoric that “if black people would simply get an education, their income disparity would disappear." That’s simply not true.
According to a recent report, “Educational Attainment in the United States: 2005,” black high school grads earned $23,498, as compared to $30,197 for white high school grads. Blacks with bachelors degrees earned $42,342, as compared to $53,411 for white bachelors degree holders, and blacks with doctoral degrees earned $82,615, as compared to $94,426 for white doctoral degree holders. So much for the education argument; that's clearly not the whole answer.
Isn’t this an issue, then, for the Black Caucus, the guys who just had that great, upscale party in D.C. in September?
Over a single, four-day period, in late September, mainstream media carried two very conflicting stories – one said that the U.S poverty rate had risen to 14.3 percent in 2009, the highest rate since 1994, and that the 43.6 million Americans living in poverty is the highest level in the 51 years since such records have been kept. The other story, which I’m sure you all saw, informed us that the “Great Recession” has officially ended.
As deeply unsettling as the overall poverty rate news was, if you dug a little deeper, you learned that the poverty rate for black Americans is nearly twice the white rate, at 25.8 percent. That has a great deal to do with the fact that our families earn, on average, only 59 percent of white household income.
I don’t know about you, but, as I’ve mentioned previously, I’m really beginning to get a little nervous about the integrity and credibility of the economic information that we get fed every day. It’s starting to smell.
I know, I know….technically, a recession ends after a declining economy hits its low point and starts to head back up in a positive direction. The economists usually determine all of that by looking at factors that comprise the nation's Gross Domestic Product, including private consumption levels, business investment rates, government spending and the national trade balance.
The U.S. economy still seems to be "sucking wind" by every one of those measures, with the lone exception of government spending. I’ll go out on a limb and predict that, with the rising influence of the Tea Party, fiscal and social conservativism and the Republican Party, in general, there will be a budget reduction mania sweeping the country that will sharply reduce government spending as a contributor to GDP, in the months to come, bringing back our friend, the Great Recession, for a second "dip." The housing market is dead in the water, businesses are reluctant to expand or hire, large corporations continue to send investments and jobs overseas, unemployment is at historically high levels – especially in black communities – and banks are only lending money to people who are so well off that they don’t need any loans.
The recession is over? They can't honestly expect us--especially us-- to believe that.
We've got eyes don’t we?
When will our government leaders realize that until we significantly modify our business model, until we reduce the incentive for businesses to cut costs by sending jobs overseas, and until we reduce the incentive to generate unending streams of quarterly profits--no matter what-- there is scant probability that there will be a credible economic recovery here in the U.S., in the foreseeable future?
And, finally, with other demographic groups, whose economic issues are nowhere near as desperate or as urgent as ours, already in the streets, in the Halls of Congress and on the Internet fighting for a larger share of the "American economic pie," what in God’s name are we waiting for?
Let’s start flashing our “40 % less" signs, on a regular basis, whenever we choose to gather to make a political point, and let’s put our own black-white wage disparity video on YouTube.
It’s way past time that we did so.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have 7,000 years to wait for income equity for black folks.
If white females feel justified in going to the House, the Senate, the President and, potentially, to the highest courts in the land to eliminate their wage gap, where’s our campaign? Where are our “40 % less” signs? Where is the Congressional vote in favor of wiping out the black-white pay disparity in this country, which has existed, at least, since the Constitution was signed in 1787?
We need to wake up and get off our backsides.
Even black people who have consistently been opposed to the concept of reparations “because none of the contemporary, mainstream institutions are currently engaged in, or were responsible for, slavery,” should understand that the concern about the black-white earnings disparity is not based on correcting some 150-year-old historical injustice. Rather, it's based on a current, daily and ongoing unfairness, traceable to the fact that some of us happen to be black.
And don’t fall for the tired old rhetoric that “if black people would simply get an education, their income disparity would disappear." That’s simply not true.
According to a recent report, “Educational Attainment in the United States: 2005,” black high school grads earned $23,498, as compared to $30,197 for white high school grads. Blacks with bachelors degrees earned $42,342, as compared to $53,411 for white bachelors degree holders, and blacks with doctoral degrees earned $82,615, as compared to $94,426 for white doctoral degree holders. So much for the education argument; that's clearly not the whole answer.
Isn’t this an issue, then, for the Black Caucus, the guys who just had that great, upscale party in D.C. in September?
Over a single, four-day period, in late September, mainstream media carried two very conflicting stories – one said that the U.S poverty rate had risen to 14.3 percent in 2009, the highest rate since 1994, and that the 43.6 million Americans living in poverty is the highest level in the 51 years since such records have been kept. The other story, which I’m sure you all saw, informed us that the “Great Recession” has officially ended.
As deeply unsettling as the overall poverty rate news was, if you dug a little deeper, you learned that the poverty rate for black Americans is nearly twice the white rate, at 25.8 percent. That has a great deal to do with the fact that our families earn, on average, only 59 percent of white household income.
I don’t know about you, but, as I’ve mentioned previously, I’m really beginning to get a little nervous about the integrity and credibility of the economic information that we get fed every day. It’s starting to smell.
I know, I know….technically, a recession ends after a declining economy hits its low point and starts to head back up in a positive direction. The economists usually determine all of that by looking at factors that comprise the nation's Gross Domestic Product, including private consumption levels, business investment rates, government spending and the national trade balance.
The U.S. economy still seems to be "sucking wind" by every one of those measures, with the lone exception of government spending. I’ll go out on a limb and predict that, with the rising influence of the Tea Party, fiscal and social conservativism and the Republican Party, in general, there will be a budget reduction mania sweeping the country that will sharply reduce government spending as a contributor to GDP, in the months to come, bringing back our friend, the Great Recession, for a second "dip." The housing market is dead in the water, businesses are reluctant to expand or hire, large corporations continue to send investments and jobs overseas, unemployment is at historically high levels – especially in black communities – and banks are only lending money to people who are so well off that they don’t need any loans.
The recession is over? They can't honestly expect us--especially us-- to believe that.
We've got eyes don’t we?
When will our government leaders realize that until we significantly modify our business model, until we reduce the incentive for businesses to cut costs by sending jobs overseas, and until we reduce the incentive to generate unending streams of quarterly profits--no matter what-- there is scant probability that there will be a credible economic recovery here in the U.S., in the foreseeable future?
And, finally, with other demographic groups, whose economic issues are nowhere near as desperate or as urgent as ours, already in the streets, in the Halls of Congress and on the Internet fighting for a larger share of the "American economic pie," what in God’s name are we waiting for?
Let’s start flashing our “40 % less" signs, on a regular basis, whenever we choose to gather to make a political point, and let’s put our own black-white wage disparity video on YouTube.
It’s way past time that we did so.
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