Race and the Recession

by Leigh Graham

categories: Cities, Federal, Government, Gulf Coast, Health & Healthcare, Housing, Immigration, Incarceration & Crime, Inequality, Jobs & Unemployment, News, Policy, Race Ethnicity Class & Gender, Research, stimulus, The Economy

Published May 29, 2009 @ 11:30AM PT

Photo of murals under I-10 at Claiborne Ave in New Orleans.  On Claiborne was a thriving black business district in Treme in New Orleans that was destroyed by the development of highway I-10.  Urban renewal and federal highway projects repeatedly destroyed thriving black neighborhoods throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

Race & the Recession is the title of a new report out by the Applied Research Center, subtitled "How Inequity Rigged the Economy and How to Change the Rules."  I find it especially timely to cover here given the conversation on race, racism, right-wing politics and Reagan unfolding below.  I'd also recommend hightailing it over to Ta-Nehisi today, who is just repeatedly nailing this topic with eloquence and erudition, not an easy thing to accomplish.

Race and the Recession mixes stories and data to demonstrate the disproportionate impacts on people of color in this recession.  This does not mean that whites/Anglo-Americans are not also suffering - what it means is that given our respective demographic populations in the US, we are likely to see outsized numbers of stories of layoffs, foreclosures, low-wages, lack of health coverage, etc. among non-white Americans.  The report details the way disparities in lending, in wealth accumulation, in hiring and employment practices, in wages, etc. create cumulative, downward effects on people of color that makes recessionary periods especially difficult to weather and overcome.

After the jump are highlights from the report, and the policies we need to reduce this inequality - recommendations include universal healthcare, raising the minimum wage, updating decades old community investment policies, assessing the racial impacts of proposed policies, and expanding our emergency relief for the time being.

People of color have been relegated to precarious, low-wage work—or no work−at disproportionate rates. Black, Latino, Asian and American Indian communities face barriers to employment, including discrimination in hires and promotions, unfair criminal background checks and the lack of protections for immigrant workers. As a result, communities of color on the whole, relative to whites, face higher rates of poverty, are less likely to have healthcare and consistently face recessionary levels of unemployment and underemployment.

An accompanying graph shows that the unemployment rate among whites in March 2009 was 7%; for blacks it was 13%; for Latin@s 11%.

Because people of color have less income and less wealth, they have less to fall back on in hard times, and yet the safety net for poor families has been eroded over the past dozen years. The compounding effects of lower wages, diminishing wealth and a decayed social safety net leave families of color with little hope and a growing possibility of falling into desperate times.

Racist policies have a cumulative effect over time that lasts for generations:

The cumulative effects of historic and current housing discrimination—including restrictive racial covenants, redlining and neighborhood segregation—have left people of color with less equity and access to credit, making them vulnerable to disproportionate rates of predatory lending and foreclosure. Communities of color were saddled with predatory subprime loans at very high rates. Many were sold subprime loans when they could have qualified for prime loans. The foreclosure epidemic has plagued communities of color and caused a loss of wealth that will have lasting generational effects. Disproportionate rates of foreclosure compound the deep and growing racial wealth divide.

I recommend reading the whole thing - don't miss the graphs.  Then visit the Applied Research Center to learn more about what you can do, or to share your story.