People of Color in a Future of Resilient Communities

Question posed to John Robb on his blog:

John, I have a blunt question, something I've been chewing on a lot and want to toss your way.

What do you imagine will be the fate of racial and ethnic minorities in America in a future of resilient communities?

It seems that in order for communities to self-police effectively, there is going to need to be an "us" (vs. them) that is known or recognizable. There will likely be some paring off by race and ethnicity in this process. I also imagine the enforcement of community borders must come with a willingness to do what is necessary to enforce them -- e.g., racial profiling and what-have-you.

And will this result in minorities being ghetto-ized in self-governing communities that are in fact economically-dependent serf communities to adjacent, better-off, and probably white communities? (Think Palestine to Israel.)

After all, some communities are bound to start out more resilient than others, and the poor inner city communities in which blacks and immigrants are currently ghetto-ized are not exactly going to be primed for success, being utterly resource-dependent and largely landless.

Finally, if the above, is nationalism actually the better path for minorities EVEN IN THE FACE of the future you see, which I also see? Is it wiser for them to fight like hell for larger-scale governance units, for the sake of their own well-being or even survival? Would it EVEN be prescient for minority groups to join with the hypernationalist and anti-immigrant sentiment in the country right now? Would this allow them to be part of the "us", part of the in-group?

The return of blatant racism and ethnic factioning bums me out. I have grown up and lived in multicultural urban areas, and have always felt this enriched my life and, I'd hope, their life. But can this last?

Black-owned businesses in America: another way to measure economic inequality

Income inequality between Blacks and Whites in America is bad, but in itself offers an incomplete picture of the real economic inequality between the two races.

Median per capita Black income, circa 2008, was $34,218.
Median per capita White (non-Hispanic) income was $55,530.

This means that Blacks, on average, made about 62% what whites made.

As dismal as this income disparity is, however, it is not representative of the extent of economic inequality.

When we look at economic inequality in terms of business ownership, a more disturbing picture emerges.

In 2002 (according to the U.S. Census' Survey of Business Owners):

White Americans, though only 69.1 percent of the population, owned 86.6 percent of business firms. Black Americans, despite making up 12.8 percent of the American population, owned 5.2 percent of firms. White-owned firms accounted for 36.6 percent of the total sales and receipts in the American market (excluding publicly held and other unclassifiable firms), while Black-owned firms accounted for only 0.4 percent of total sales and receipts.

This means that Whites are over-represented as business owners (per their proportion of the population) by 25%, while Blacks are under-represented by nearly 60%.

One of the most startling numbers in this analysis, however, is this: the total sales and receipts of White-owned firms are nearly 100 times that of Black-owned firms.

Considering that Blacks make up nearly 13 percent of the U.S. population and Whites make up about 70 percent, if all was fair the total sales and receipts of Black-owned firms would account for about 6.8 percent. In other words, Black businesses are making less than 6 percent of what they should be, in a just and fair world.

Finally, Whites are three and a half times more likely to own businesses with paid employees than Blacks; three and a half times more likely to be boss. And since Blacks make up a disproportionate number of employees (considering the relative lack of business ownership), we can guess that Whites are probably far, far more likely to boss around Black folks than the other way around.

This pattern is perpetuated outside of business ownership as well, where Blacks and Whites compete for positions of authority in businesses they don't own. According to the 2002 Census CPS, the percent of Blacks in the workforce who were working as administrators or in executive and managerial occupations in March of 2002 was 9.9 percent, compared to 17.2 percent of Whites. In 2003, Blacks made up 18.7 percent of social and community service workers but only 11 percent of social and community service managers. Similarly, while Blacks made up 13.9 percent of production, transportation, and material moving workers, they accounted for only 5.9 percent of transportation, storage, and distribution managers. The trend here is that Blacks make up a disproportionately low number of managers even within industries in which they are represented disproportionately higher than other races.

from "Darlin' Cora" as sung by Harry Belafonte:

I don’t know why darlin’ Cora
Don’t know what the reason can be
But I never yet found a single town
Where me and the boss-man agree

I ain’t a man to be played with
I ain’t nobody’s toy
Been working for my pay for a long, long time
How come he still calls me boy

Well I’d rather drink muddy water
And sleep in a hollowed out log
Than to hang around in this old town
And be treated like a dirty dog

Well I whopped that man darlin’ Cora
And he fell down where he stood
Don't know if I was wrong darlin’ Cora
But Lord it sure felt good