Gates Article NY Times
The New York Times
_____
September 26, 2004
GUEST COLUMNIST
Getting to Average
By HENRY LOUIS GATES JR.
W hen black policytypes let themselves dream about racial uplift, they dream about getting toaverage. The fantasy isn't that inequality vanishes; it's that inequality inblack America catches up with inequality in white America. And, for themoment, a fantasy is all it is. Since the 1968 assassination of MartinLuther King Jr., the black middle class has increased significantly, yet thepercentage of black children living in poverty has hovered between 30 and 40percent.
"Look at what we could achieve if we got to be average!" Franklin Raines,the C.E.O. of Fannie Mae, told me. "We don't need to take everybody from theghetto and make them Harvard graduates. We just need to get folks toaverage, and we'd all look around and say, 'My God, what a fundamentalchange has happened in this country.' "
How big a change? He's done the math. "If America had racial equality ineducation and jobs, African-Americans would have two million more highschool degrees, two million more college degrees, nearly two million moreprofessional and managerial jobs, and nearly $200 billion more income," hepointed out in a speech. "If America had racial equality in housing, threemillion more Americans would own their own homes. And if America had racialequality in wealth, African-Americans would have $760 billion more in equityvalue, $200 billion more in the stock market, $120 billion more in theirretirement funds and $80 billion more in the bank." Total: Over $1 trillion.
Recently, I asked a few experts on poverty in black America about how wemight get to average. I heard a lot of deep breaths. When they picture blackAmerica, they see Buffalo - a boarded-up central city and a few lakefrontmansions. The glory days for the black working class were from 1940 to 1970,when manufacturing boomed and factory jobs were plentiful. But when themanufacturing sector became eclipsed by the service economy, black workersended up - well, stuck in a demographic Buffalo.
My colleague William Julius Wilson, the sociologist, thinks better manpowerpolicies would help. Once black workers moved to where the jobs were; theyneed to do it again. Instead of trying to turn ghettos into boomtowns, then,we ought to provide workers with relocation assistance, and create"transitional public sector jobs" for those who haven't yet found aprivate-sector gig. Oh, and - since we're dreaming - fixing the schoolswould be nice, including "school-to-work transition programs," to place highschool grads in the job market.
Raines, as you might expect, considers homeownership to be crucial to wealthgeneration. "The average person develops more wealth in their home than theydo in the stock market. Next to a job, it's the most important thing in afamily's lives." Blacks, he notes, are considerably less likely to own theirown homes than whites.
How to afford one, though? "The whole new service economy is fundamentallybased on communications, the Internet, electronics," he told me. "Thatinfrastructure is going to need people who can manage it, and those jobs aregoing to move from very high tech to being service jobs, just the way ithappened at the telephone company. You used to have to be a scientist tooperate a phone, and then it became a blue-collar job."
But maybe, as the economist Glenn Loury suggests, we need to aim lower."There doesn't seem to be an end in sight to the vast, disproportionateoverrepresentation of African-Americans in prison or jails," he told me."It's our deepest problem." Job training for willing prisoners would be agood start.
Loury considers welfare reform a success: "We ask a lot more of mothers, andthey have given us a lot more, and they and we are both better off for ourhaving asked." When it comes to education, though, he advocates "equalexpenditures per kid, no matter where they live." In fact, he'd spend moremoney on inferior school districts, at least over the short run, to bringthem up to standard.
Would any of these initiatives really make much of a difference in an age ofoffshoring? As everyone I spoke to agreed, we're unlikely to find out. Therejust isn't the political will, in either party. The White House hasrelegated its costly experiments in social engineering to Iraq. And so the60's generation now seems to be presiding over the permanent entrenchment ofa vast black underclass.
Has average really become too much to ask for?
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a guest columnist through September. Thomas L.Friedman is on book leave.
E-mail: hlgates@nytimes.com
Copyright 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html>The New York Times Company <http://www.nytco.com/>
_____
September 26, 2004
GUEST COLUMNIST
Getting to Average
By HENRY LOUIS GATES JR.
W hen black policytypes let themselves dream about racial uplift, they dream about getting toaverage. The fantasy isn't that inequality vanishes; it's that inequality inblack America catches up with inequality in white America. And, for themoment, a fantasy is all it is. Since the 1968 assassination of MartinLuther King Jr., the black middle class has increased significantly, yet thepercentage of black children living in poverty has hovered between 30 and 40percent.
"Look at what we could achieve if we got to be average!" Franklin Raines,the C.E.O. of Fannie Mae, told me. "We don't need to take everybody from theghetto and make them Harvard graduates. We just need to get folks toaverage, and we'd all look around and say, 'My God, what a fundamentalchange has happened in this country.' "
How big a change? He's done the math. "If America had racial equality ineducation and jobs, African-Americans would have two million more highschool degrees, two million more college degrees, nearly two million moreprofessional and managerial jobs, and nearly $200 billion more income," hepointed out in a speech. "If America had racial equality in housing, threemillion more Americans would own their own homes. And if America had racialequality in wealth, African-Americans would have $760 billion more in equityvalue, $200 billion more in the stock market, $120 billion more in theirretirement funds and $80 billion more in the bank." Total: Over $1 trillion.
Recently, I asked a few experts on poverty in black America about how wemight get to average. I heard a lot of deep breaths. When they picture blackAmerica, they see Buffalo - a boarded-up central city and a few lakefrontmansions. The glory days for the black working class were from 1940 to 1970,when manufacturing boomed and factory jobs were plentiful. But when themanufacturing sector became eclipsed by the service economy, black workersended up - well, stuck in a demographic Buffalo.
My colleague William Julius Wilson, the sociologist, thinks better manpowerpolicies would help. Once black workers moved to where the jobs were; theyneed to do it again. Instead of trying to turn ghettos into boomtowns, then,we ought to provide workers with relocation assistance, and create"transitional public sector jobs" for those who haven't yet found aprivate-sector gig. Oh, and - since we're dreaming - fixing the schoolswould be nice, including "school-to-work transition programs," to place highschool grads in the job market.
Raines, as you might expect, considers homeownership to be crucial to wealthgeneration. "The average person develops more wealth in their home than theydo in the stock market. Next to a job, it's the most important thing in afamily's lives." Blacks, he notes, are considerably less likely to own theirown homes than whites.
How to afford one, though? "The whole new service economy is fundamentallybased on communications, the Internet, electronics," he told me. "Thatinfrastructure is going to need people who can manage it, and those jobs aregoing to move from very high tech to being service jobs, just the way ithappened at the telephone company. You used to have to be a scientist tooperate a phone, and then it became a blue-collar job."
But maybe, as the economist Glenn Loury suggests, we need to aim lower."There doesn't seem to be an end in sight to the vast, disproportionateoverrepresentation of African-Americans in prison or jails," he told me."It's our deepest problem." Job training for willing prisoners would be agood start.
Loury considers welfare reform a success: "We ask a lot more of mothers, andthey have given us a lot more, and they and we are both better off for ourhaving asked." When it comes to education, though, he advocates "equalexpenditures per kid, no matter where they live." In fact, he'd spend moremoney on inferior school districts, at least over the short run, to bringthem up to standard.
Would any of these initiatives really make much of a difference in an age ofoffshoring? As everyone I spoke to agreed, we're unlikely to find out. Therejust isn't the political will, in either party. The White House hasrelegated its costly experiments in social engineering to Iraq. And so the60's generation now seems to be presiding over the permanent entrenchment ofa vast black underclass.
Has average really become too much to ask for?
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a guest columnist through September. Thomas L.Friedman is on book leave.
E-mail: hlgates@nytimes.com
Copyright 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html>The New York Times Company <http://www.nytco.com/>
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