Sixty years after civil rights leaders demanded equal access to employment and fair wages for Black Americans at the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, economic equity is still far from a reality in the U.S.
While advocates acknowledge that some strides have been made in the decades since the march, notable gaps persist between Black and white Americans in areas such as wealth and income, joblessness and homeownership.
And concern is mounting that further progress could be threatened amid rising racial tensions.
\u201cWe are strongly not on the path of bridging inequality,\u201d said Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, chief of Race, Wealth and Community for the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC).
\u201cI think oftentimes, people approach it like, \u2018Oh, we\u2019re almost there. There\u2019s a few things we got to do,\u2019\u201d he said. But, he argued, \u201cWe are on a very clear path of ongoing Black-white economic apartheid for centuries \u2014 unless we do radical policy change.\u201d
Glaring disparities persist decades later <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Roughly 250,000 people gathered for the march\u00a0on Aug. 28, 1963,\u00a0with a\u00a0list of demands\u00a0from Washington for effective policy combatting discrimination in federal programs and in labor, including calls for a \u201cdecent\u201d minimum wage, housing and education for all Americans.\u00a0 Sixty years after civil rights leaders demanded equal access to employment and fair wages for Black Americans at the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, economic equity is still far from a reality in the U.S. While advocates acknowledge that some strides have been made in the decades since the march, notable gaps persist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":17131,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1155],"tags":[21922,21923,4946],"class_list":["post-17130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-economic-fairness","tag-march-on-washington","tag-supporters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17130"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17132,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17130\/revisions\/17132"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Decades later, experts and advocates point to significant\u00a0remaining disparities between races.
The racial wealth gap\u00a0has narrowed only slightly\u00a0since the march.\u00a0The ratio between white and Black wealth per capita\u00a0saw a notable decline\u00a0in the years following emancipation, according to a\u00a0June 2022\u00a0paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. In 1860, that ratio stood at roughly 60-to-1. By the 1920s, it was down to 10-to-1.\u00a0
But it\u00a0decreased\u00a0much more slowly in the years that followed,\u00a0reaching 7-to-1 in the 1950s before inching to \u201ca similar magnitude of 6-to-1\u201d roughly seven decades later.
Among the factors that likely slowed progress in closing the gap, the report cites the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and the nation\u2019s lengthy history of racist laws and practices, ranging from political disenfranchisement of Black Americans to Jim Crow-era policies.\u00a0
\u201cYou have to be honest about these policies and their impacts,\u201d said Algernon Austin, the Director for Race and Economic Justice at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. \u201cAnd then when you fail to do that, then people who have political agendas to maintain, frankly, to maintain white supremacy, then can attack all these attempts at remediation.\u201d
Other economic disparities have also persisted into the present day.\u00a0Among Americans who are employed, research from the\u00a0Economic Policy Institute\u00a0(EPI) showed the typical Black worker made more than 24 percent less than their white counterparts per hour in 2019 \u2014 a figure the group noted was about 8\u00a0percentage points\u00a0higher than\u00a0it was four\u00a0decades\u00a0earlier.
There is much more work to be done to address\u00a0the\u00a0Black-white homeownership gap, advocates add.\u00a0A 2022\u2002report\u00a0from the National Association of Real Estate Brokers found the Black homeownership rate\u00a0had\u00a0\u201conly modestly\u201d increased since the 1968 passage of the Fair Housing Act, while the racial homeownership gap has widened over the years.
The report found the homeownership disparity between Black and white Americans, which\u00a0sat at 23.8 percent in 1970,\u00a0reached\u00a0more than 31 percent\u00a0five decades later.\u00a0It\u00a0said the gap hit 30 percent in 2022, continuing what the group called \u201ca two-decades long trend of an expanding homeownership gap between Blacks and whites.\u201d
\u201cWe have housing disparities that are wider than they were during Jim Crow,\u201d said Samantha Tweedy, chief executive officer for the Black Economic Alliance, in an interview, calling housing \u201cone of the foremost drivers of wealth in this country.\u201d
Earlier this year,\u00a0the White House cheered data showing the Black unemployment rate fell to a historic low in March, with Bharat Ramamurti, deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, calling the news an \u201cincredible milestone\u201d in remarks to\u00a0TheGrio\u2002at the time.\u00a0
\u201cPresident [Biden] and Vice President [Harris], from the moment that they came into office, identified that they not only wanted to have a strong economic recovery, they wanted to have an equitable recovery,\u201d Ramamurti said then.
The rate\u00a0hit 5 percent in March, compared to\u00a0a\u00a03.2\u00a0percent\u00a0unemployment rate for white Americans, and\u00a0fell again\u2002in April, reaching 4.7 percent, before seeing upticks in the following months. But advocates are pushing for more sustained improvements.
\u201cYou can\u2019t draw any conclusions from one month of numbers,\u201d National Urban League President\u00a0Marc Morial\u2002said. \u201cThe issue is, is the gap now over a one-, two-, three-year period?\u201d
\u201c\u200b\u200bWhile I like to see the gap narrow, I\u2019m not popping a cork on one or two months of a narrower gap,\u201d he added, adding: \u201cWe have to measure these things in sustainability.\u201d
At the same time, experts\u00a0have pointed\u00a0to some\u00a0progress the nation has made toward racial economic equality\u00a0over a longer time,\u00a0including headway in educational attainment and an overall drop in the poverty rate for Black Americans \u2014\u00a0which\u2002data from EPI\u00a0shows declined more than 12 percent between\u00a01968, when it sat at 34.7 percent, and 2016.
\u201cIn 1962, whites had about 2.4 times the four-year college attainment level of Blacks,\u201d\u00a0Asante-Muhammad\u00a0said,\u00a0while discussing the racial gap in higher education. \u201cIn 2022,\u00a0it\u2019s 1.7. So still, serious disparities, but there has been some bridging over those years.\u201d
However, he also notes African Americans with college degrees don\u2019t have equal\u00a0levels of\u00a0employment to their white counterparts, nor \u201chave equal income levels and really don\u2019t have equal wealth levels.\u201d
\u201cEven with kind of solid educational attainment, even with less segregation, more civil rights laws, we still see this massive income inequality that, if it continued to improve, as it has been since 1963, it would take us over 500 years for Blacks just to get income equality with whites,\u201d he argued.\u00a0
Research\u00a0shows views of capitalism have shifted among Black Americans over the years, with a 2022 survey from the\u00a0Pew Research Center\u00a0finding 54 percent of Black adults said \u201cthey had a very or somewhat negative impression of capitalism.\u201d The number is a 14-percentage-point\u00a0jump from 2019.
\u201cThe question is, is it working for me?\u201d Morial said of the findings. \u201cThat\u2019s the issue.\u201d
\u201cPeople are saying, well, if I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve got a fair wage, well, they\u2019re gonna tell you they don\u2019t think the economic system\u2019s working for them,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s less of a philosophical question and more of a practical question.\u201d
\u2018A threat to progress\u2019
There is concern among advocates and experts\u00a0that\u00a0an increased focus by conservatives on affirmative action and diversity initiatives could add greater hurdles to the battle for\u00a0economic equality\u00a0in the years ahead.
\u201cThe biggest threat is the right-wing assault on the policies which have made a difference,\u201d National Urban League president Marc Morial said. \u201cThey\u2019ve not made enough of a difference,\u00a0but they\u2019ve made a difference. It\u2019s an assault by right-wing interests.\u201d
From\u00a0GOP-led efforts\u00a0restricting\u00a0how race is taught in schools across the country to\u00a0those\u00a0targeting affirmative action,\u00a0advocates have been\u00a0sounding alarms over what they see as a backlash to initiatives aimed at\u00a0improving\u00a0racial diversity and inclusion that gained momentum\u00a0during\u00a0the months of global protests against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
Bills have also gained traction in the Republican House majority that seek to take aim at diversity training and efforts to increase representation as part of a larger so-called \u201canti-woke\u201d push proponents say is needed to tackle unfair and unnecessary race initiatives.
\u201cWhen you\u2019re trying to reduce some of this burden that\u2019s been placed on these victims of racial subjugation, and you\u2019re calling that racist, it\u2019s racist to call that racist,\u201d Austin\u00a0said.
\u201cThat\u2019s the problem in this society, which is in fact why we need to talk about race more, and more honestly, because we live in a society where being white has been a positive, has given you preferences in varieties of ways,\u201d\u00a0he\u00a0said, citing the impact of redlining, segregation, criminal justice policies and underfunding schools in the Black community.\u00a0
The road ahead
Experts say a combination of race-conscious policies and broader measures like wage and labor reform is necessary to narrow racial economic gaps. But some have doubts about how far national leaders are willing to go to address those disparities, given history.
A recent\u00a0report from the\u2002NCRC\u00a0estimated it would take more than 500 years for Black Americans to reach the white median household income at the pace set in past decades.\u00a0
\u201cI think the biggest threat is the unwillingness to seriously commit\u00a0to\u00a0redistribution of resources, which is what is required to bridge racial inequality,\u201d Asante-Muhammad\u00a0of the NCRC\u00a0said \u2014 a problem he charged both sides of the aisle with\u00a0failing\u00a0to adequately address.\u00a0
\u201cIt\u2019s one thing to take down the segregation sign, it\u2019s another thing to invest in building affordable housing and doing lending in a way that would strongly increase Black homeownership,\u201d he said. \u201cThose are different.\u201d
As the nation marks the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, advocates say the demands made by\u00a0the hundreds\u00a0of\u00a0thousands of\u00a0protesters\u00a0who gathered in the nation\u2019s capital for the event still hold today \u2014 including those for better wages and jobs.
\u201cRaising the minimum wage is crucial,\u201d Morial also said. \u201cIncrease in job training and education is crucial. Enforcing anti-discrimination laws is crucial.\u201d
\u201cCreating more tools and more of a commitment to homeownership for low and moderate income Americans is crucial,\u201d he said. \u201cRaising and improving access to capital for small businesses and Black small businesses is crucial.\u201d
Asante-Muhammad\u00a0points to measures congressional lawmakers have introduced that focus on Black homeownership, reparations and asset policies,\u00a0like the\u00a0baby bonds proposal\u2002championed\u00a0by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.),\u00a0as steps in the right direction in countering economic inequality.\u00a0
But many experts aren\u2019t holding their breath for significant change anytime soon.
\u201cThere used to be a time when there was more agreement on what the basic facts were, that we\u2019re dealing with, and then we could argue about, \u2018OK, what\u2019s the appropriate solution?\u2019\u201d\u00a0said Austin.
\u201cBut now, when people are wanting to make up facts, then it\u2019s really hard to have a productive debate over what is the appropriate solution,\u201d\u00a0he\u00a0said.
thehill<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"