As we closed out the year 2018, we ended a 50-year period that began with the tumultuous year, 1968. Much has happened during this time. It started with African Americans beginning to exercise a real right to vote after the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Many more African Americans voted and many gained elective office. And 40 years later, in 2008, an African American, Barack Obama, was elected president.
Unfortunately, the data show that with all of this progress on the electoral front there was little if any relative improvement in the lives of Black Americans in comparison to white Americans. In fact, with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013, 2018 might be the worse year of the suppression of voting by African Americans and other minorities since 1968.
Let’s look at the racial situation in a couple of other areas.
Housing: In 2008 the National Commission on Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, co-chaired by former Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretaries, Democrat Henry Cisneros and Republican Jack Kemp, investigated the state of fair housing. To assess progress since the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Commission held hearings for six months in five major cities. They concluded that ongoing discriminatory practices in the nation’s housing and lending markets continued to produce residential segregation.
Despite this bipartisan assessment, the current Administration is scaling back fair housing enforcement and moving to make it more difficult to find patterns of discriminatory or predatory lending. They have passed legislation to exempt banks from their obligation to collect and provide data routinely collected on their lending processes.
Economics: The Great Recession of 2007-8 was far worse for African Americans than whites. Black homeowners had a higher percentage of their wealth tied up in home equity, and they were much more likely to be victims of predatory lending during the housing boom. Blacks and Latinos were more than twice as likely as comparable whites to receive high-cost loans. African-Americans have lost over half of their wealth since the beginning of the recession through falling homeownership rates and loss of jobs.
African American families are continuing to fall behind whites in building wealth—how much a family has in savings, investments, real estate, and cash, less any debts. White family wealth was seven times greater than Black family wealth in 2016. Despite some fluctuations over the past five decades, this disparity is as high or higher than was in 1963.
Further, there has been no reduction in labor market discrimination. At the Race and Social Policy Research Center at Virginia Tech, we analyzed the income of all Black and white full-time workers in the United States between 1967 and 2005. Controlling for education, we found that for every dollar a white worker earned in 1967 a Black worker earned 65 cents. In 2005, a Black worker earned 66 cents for every dollar that a white person earned, not a real increase.
We need more urgency in the struggle to right these wrongs.
