It's Hard Out Here For An “Assimilator.”

The current, distressed U.S. economy is making it very difficult for people in our community who count residential assimilation among their top-priority life’s goals.

What happens in our individual households and neighborhoods--black or white-- is often driven by larger, even global, forces that we’ve been taught to take pretty much for granted.

In a perverse way, as an example, we’ve grown almost “comfortable” with hearing every month that the overall unemployment rate in this country continues to be just below 10 percent. When unemployment rates have come close to that range in other "developed"nations, people have, literally, “taken to the streets.”

In fact, over the 2008-2010 period, the comparably calculated unemployment rate in Greece was 9.5 percent; in France, 9.1 percent, in the UK, 7.7 percent, and Italy reported 7.9 percent as its unemployment rate. Each of these countries has had to deal with angry mobs of their own citizens staging violent, and sometimes lethal, demonstrations in opposition to their country's economic policies.

Last week, the U.S. Labor Department disclosed that, as of August, there were 14.9 million unemployed persons in the United States and that the country's unemployment rate had increased from 9.5 percent to 9.6 percent, that white male unemployment now stood at 8.9 percent and that black male unemployment was almost twice that level, at 17.3 percent.

Virtually no one in the country seemed to bat an eye – certainly not many in the economically depressed black community.

A large part of the national “sleep walk” on what should be dramatically unsettling numbers for all of us, has to be attributed to the “spin” with which we get immediately bombarded as soon as sensitive economic data such as the unemployment rates are released.

In July, it was "U.S. News and World Report" that informed us that “...a rising unemployment rate is actually one of the best signs yet that the economy is bouncing back.”

Huh?

Last week, when the increased August unemployment rate was announced, President Obama said the report represented “positive news,” somehow. At the same time, a new, hotshot Wall Street economist, who coincidentally admits to being a member of the Democratic Party, was rolled out to say, right on cue, that the latest unemployment rate increase “solidifies that economic recovery is going to remain intact.”

Wow!

What will they say if the unemployment numbers actually ever do go down? Will that be a BAD sign for the economy?

At least in Europe, they seem to be willing to “call a spade a spade,” as it were. Here, so far, we’ve apparently decided, at the very highest levels of our government, to lie our way through our economic challenges, to just "make it up."

For far too many of us, however, it should be growing more and more difficult to swallow the “party line.” We see, now, that the state of the economy is having a more and more immediate impact on our own families, on whether we'll have healthcare, and whether we'll have a choice of where we want to live. We've got to start paying more attention and letting our voices be heard.

In that regard, a recent study by United for a Fair Economy has disclosed that the subprime lending crisis has resulted in the “greatest loss of wealth to blacks and Latinos in modern history,” with black borrowers, alone, having lost between $72 and $93 billion.

While we’re on the subject of wealth, according to the New York Times, white families saw dramatic growth in their financial assets – from a $22,000 median value in 1983 to $100,000 in median value in 2007, just before the onset of the “Great Recession.” By comparison, high-income black families reported median assets of just $18,000 in the same year. During that period, the Times continued, at least 25 percent of black families had absolutely no assets whatsoever to rely upon in the event of an economic crisis, such as a job loss or business failure.

All of this explains very clearly why African Americans have consistently had less money to invest in colleges for their children, in business opportunities, or in real estate. It also goes a long way to explain why, even today, blacks represent 13 percent of the U.S. population, but constitute 46 percent of public housing residents, nationwide.

On that subject, with all of the recent news about the reduction of public housing residential density over the past 20 years or so, it is clear that there has been a nationally directed and funded plan in place to reclaim what had been red-lined, significantly undervalued, predominantly black central city neighborhoods: "We'll rebuild, and we'll do it with nicer homes, but we'll end up with far fewer than ever existed before," clearly seemed to be the plan. As part of that process, upper-income whites began to sell their suburban homesteads and rush back into what had been called the inner city, in places such as Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, DC and New York City.

In the process, they drove up home prices and tax levels and made affordable properties so scarce that African Americans, in far too many cases, could no longer afford to live in the neighborhoods in which they were born and raised. Many of them were forced, by these gentrification/”neighborhood improvement" plans, to move out to the more-affordable edges of their cities and, even, into the suburbs. If you think I'm kidding, take a look at how the demographics of Philadelphia's own "Great Northeast" and the neighborhood around Temple University have changed over the past 20 years, or so.

At the same time, many newly upwardly mobile African Americans, eyes steadily fixed on achieving the “American Dream” of a fine suburban home (and, I guess, a daily 90-minute commute) also headed to the “burbs,” certainly not to the same sections of the suburbs as their lower-income, former black neighbors, but into the suburbs, nonetheless.

So there you had it: Blacks forced, or otherwise motivated, to move out of the cities, and whites, no less motivated to move back in. Their moving vans probably passed each other on many an evening, going in opposite directions, to their new homes. As an example of that very phenomenon, over the past decade, the city of Atlanta experienced the greatest growth of its white resident base of any major city in the country –- blacks moving out, whites moving in.

On that subject, did you happen to notice how close that last mayor’s race was in Maynard Jackson's old hometown? The next one, I'll go way out on a limb and predict, will be even closer.

Apparently, the upwardly mobile African Americans who were breaking their necks to move out to the "fine homes" in the suburbs across the country didn’t get the email. Most arrived just in time, over the past decade, to pay the very highest prices for the homes they purchased, just in time to pay $3.50 and $4.00 per gallon for the gas they needed for their new, daily commute, and just in time to pay exorbitant, infrastructure-related tax increases for the maintenance now required for their recently over-populated suburban communities.

What a cruel hoax!

With their mortgage balances now higher than their property values, many won’t be able to move back into the new, trendy urban centers they just left, for quite awhile. The collapse of the mortgage market and the resulting financial crisis has put an unexpected crimp in any plans they might have had in that regard.

Economies like the one we’re experiencing make it very, very difficult for African Americans who haven't been paying close attention to the fundamental shifts in our national economy and whose primary goal has been to be residentially assimilated into the mainstream.

They're learning, much to their dismay, how difficult it can be, actually, to effect that assimilation when the people with whom they want to assimilate always seem to stay one step ahead of them in the age-old game of neighborhood "musical chairs."

Somehow, it seems unfair.

I almost feel sorry for them.



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