Achieving Equal Opportunity for African-Americans
Individuals always possess agency for their own lives, but we cannot ignore the context in which those choices take place.
The biggest problem with ascribing poverty to individual behavior or cultural factors is that it implicitly assumes that everyone in our society is operating on a level playing field. But that is manifestly untrue. Throughout our country’s long history of mistreatment of people of color, immigrants, and other disadvantaged groups, the choices made by many poor people have been constrained by circumstances outside their control.
There is no question that African Americans are disproportionately likely to be trapped in poverty.* Roughly 19.5 percent of African Americans live in poverty, compared with just 8 percent of non-Hispanic whites. Roughly a quarter of African American children are poor. Poverty rates for African Americans exceed those for whites in all categories of education, work effort, and family structure.** Moreover, African American poverty is different from white poverty in substantial ways. For example, a black family that is poor is far more likely than a white one that is poor to live in a neighborhood where most other families are poor, resulting in what sociologists call the “double burden” of poverty. African Americans who are poor are also less likely to escape poverty than whites who are poor, and their children are more likely to grow up poor. Less than 5 percent of white children will spend half of their childhood in poverty, whereas nearly 40 percent of African American children will do so. There is more likely to be a social estrangement leading to a wide variety of additional pathologies, from crime to poor educational attainment to high rates of unmarried births.
The question is: to what degree is this poverty a legacy of past mistreatment, or the result of contemporary ongoing racism, or both?
It is hard to argue that there is not a connection. As President Lyndon Johnson put it:
Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.
In looking at the relationship between racism and African American poverty, we need to consider four factors: (1) the legacy impact of past racism; (2) current racial bias, whether explicit or implicit and internalized; (3) the psychological impact of both past and current racism on individual African Americans and on black culture more generally; and (4) the degree to which racially derived stereotypes continue to influence both government policies and individual social behavior.
In particular, if we want to understand just how the historical oppression of African Americans still affects black poverty today, we need to understand the depths of this sad history. Far too many conservatives minimize the cumulative weight of the African American experience. But even a brief look at that history shows both the extent of that oppression and the myriad ways in which its legacy continues to haunt African Americans to this day.
Slavery is America’s original sin. From 1619, when a Dutch ship brought 20 African slaves ashore at Jamestown, until the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves was passed in 1807, nearly 600,000 slaves were forcibly brought to this country. At the start of the Civil War, roughly 89 percent of all black people in America, almost 4 million people, were slaves. Overall, between the first arrival of those black slaves at Jamestown and 1865 when the 13th Amendment officially outlawed slavery, millions of Africans and their decedents were held in bondage and servitude in the United States.
Initially, slavery and racism were not intrinsically linked institutions. It is neither wholly true that slavery caused prejudice nor that prejudice caused slavery. Racial prejudice predated slavery. Slavery existed in many parts of the world without regard to the race of the enslaved. In the United States, slavery began under conditions that initially had some degree of color blindness. The American colonies were in a hierarchical society where men frequently labored, sometimes involuntarily, for the benefit of others. Servants were common, and many early American settlers were indentured servants. As Lerone Bennett Jr., one of the preeminent African American scholars of early colonial history, put it, “the Colonial population consisted largely of a great mass of white and black bondsmen, who occupied roughly the same economic category and were treated with equal contempt by the lords of the plantations and legislatures.” One early visitor to the Colony of Virginia reported that the gentry “abuse their servants with intolerable oppression and hard usage.” The need for labor, especially in the agricultural south, led to the use of Native Americans and, in some cases, even white Europeans as slaves before the importation of Africans offered a large-scale and relatively inexpensive alternative.
African slaves were initially more expensive to purchase than white indentured servants were to hire, but shortages were driving up the cost of indenture contracts and, once purchased, black slaves guaranteed a lifetime of labor. Amortized over time, African slaves were quite simply a cost-effective business decision. Furthermore, unlike indentured servants, African slaves were not British citizens and were therefore exempted from even the minimal protections afforded to servants and other lower-class Englishmen. By the mid-1770s, bonded labor had been almost totally supplanted by race-based slavery.
But it was not merely the need for cheap labor that led to black slavery. The early colonists — and, indeed, the English generally — clearly saw Africans as different from themselves. While concepts such as race were not clearly defined, writings from the early colonies clearly differentiated “black” from “white.” Second, African cultures were seen as uncivilized, and inferior to that of Europeans. Like Native Americans, Africans were seen as savages, in many ways less human than whites. Lastly, most Africans were not Christians. Largely animists or Muslims, they were considered heathens. It thus became relatively simple for whites to persuade themselves that black people were inferior by nature.
Indeed, to justify slavery both to themselves and to the world, those early colonists found an entire ideology of white superiority and black inferiority had to be developed and maintained. After all, slaveholders, for all the wealth and political power, were a minority, even in the South. Slavery simply could not have survived without the support, or at least the acquiescence, of a vast number of fellow citizens who tolerated the institution’s existence, despite not owning any slaves personally. And, at the same time, the inherent cruelty of the slave system had to be obvious, even to those who did not own slaves.
To build their support among non-slaveowners, the planter class offered what some would later call “a racial bribe,” extending special privileges to poor white people to keep their interests separate from those of black people. As a result, slavery was accompanied by both legal and societal strictures designed to enforce racial separatism and white superiority. Black people, whether slave or free, were to be considered lesser than white people in every aspect of life. “The two great divisions of society are not the rich and the poor,” declared South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun in 1848, “but white and black. And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” It was made clear to even the poorest of white people that they were better than black people, thus foreclosing any class-based solidarity between them.
This attitude was backed up by a growing body of pseudo-scientific scholarship arguing that differences in physical anatomy meant that black and white were separate species, with different origins, a theory known as polygenesis. In 1839, for instance, Samuel Morton published Crania Americana, which divided humankind into five distinct races: American, Caucasian, Ethiopian, Malay, and Mongolian. According to Morton, white individuals had larger skulls than those of other races, allowing for larger brains. Therefore, white people were more intelligent and capable of creating a higher civilization. A few years later, Josiah Nott began publishing a series of essays building on Morton’s theories and arguing that there were wide variations in “innate capacity” between races. These differences, Nott claimed, made black people particularly suited for slavery. Indeed, Nott argued that without the protective role of slavery, black people were doomed to extinction.
If science were insufficient to persuade people of black inferiority, there was always religion. The prevailing scriptural view of the time, at least in the South, was that black people were descendants of Ham, the disgraced son of Noah, and were therefore ordained by God to serve. Most popularly articulated by Josiah Priest in his 1851 book, Bible Defence of Slavery, the Bible itself said that “the appointment of this race of men to servitude and slavery was a judicial act of God, or, in other words, was a divine judgment . . . and that we are not mistaken in concluding that the negro race, as a people, are judicially given over to a state of peculiar liability of being enslaved by the other races.”
By the time of the Civil War, so widespread was the belief in black inferiority and white superiority that it was largely embraced even by abolitionists. Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others, never fully accepted the underlying equality of African Americans.
As for slavery itself, one really cannot overstate its horrors or the lasting long-term impact that such an institution was likely to have on the future development of African Americans. Human beings were property. They could be whipped, branded, and otherwise physically harmed with few legal restrictions or consequences. As Edmund Morgan pointed out in his detailed study of colonial slavery, “Slaves could not be made to work for fear of losing liberty, so they had to be made to work for fear of their lives. . . . In order to get an equal or greater amount of work, it was necessary to beat slaves harder than servants, so hard, in fact, that there was a much greater chance of killing them.”
As bad as the physical abuse was, the even more insidious aspect of slavery was psychological. As W. E. B. DuBois explained: “It was in part psychological, the enforced personal feeling of inferiority, the calling of another master, the standing with hat in hand. It was the helplessness. It was the defenselessness of family life. It was the submergence below the arbitrary will of any sort of individual.”
In what would have a profound influence for generations to come, social customs, family formation, and child-rearing practices were disrupted. This started as early as the Middle Passage — the sea lanes in which the slave trade took place — where Africans, often torn from their families, found themselves mixed with peoples of widely different ethnicities, languages, and cultures under conditions that made it impossible to continue or transmit their traditional family structures.
The physical and emotional suffering only intensified within the bounds of slavery itself. Rape of slaves by their masters, their master’s male children, overseers, and sometimes guests was a common practice. It was an inherent part of slavery that a master had a total claim to a slave’s body. In addition, an entire ethos was developed to justify the exploitation of slave women. Since the 19th-century ideal for white women was purity and chastity, black women were seen as an all-too-available alternative. They were portrayed as hypersexual, wanton, and anxious to bed their masters. One southern writer defended the rape of slave women by crediting the practice for the “absence of prostitution and the purity of white women.”
Forced breeding was also a common practice. Especially after the importation of slaves was banned in 1806, ensuring large numbers of slave children was an economic necessity. Typical was the story told by one former slave to interviewers for the Works Progress Administration Slave Narrative Project in 1937:
On this plantation were more than 100 slaves who were mated indiscriminately and without any regard for family unions. If their master thought that a certain man and woman might have strong, healthy offspring, he forced them to have sexual relation, even though they were married to other slaves. If there seemed to be any slight reluctance on the part of either of the unfortunate ones, “Big Jim” would make them consummate this relationship in his presence. He used the same procedure if he thought a certain couple was not producing children fast enough.
Beyond the exploitation of women, families were disrupted in other ways. The separation and sale of family members was far too common. It is estimated that as many as one of three husbands or wives was ultimately separated from their spouse and close to half of all children were sold away from at least one parent. Even without sale, slave families were often separated by other circumstances. For example, slaves were frequently hired out to plantations or other employers who were far enough away as to make family visits infrequent or impossible. Even on a single plantation, children might be taken into “the Big House,” while their parents remained in the fields. Moreover, under slavery, there was no legal distinction between legitimate and illegitimate childbearing by slaves. And, slave marriage, although encouraged by slave owners as both a matter of religion and commerce, was not legally recognized.
On paper, of course, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments promised equality. In reality, however, the end of slavery marked the beginning of a century of legally enforced second-class citizenship.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, southern whites acted ruthlessly to preserve their political and economic power through racially targeted violence, discriminatory legal structures, and racially biased social norms. Behind the legal infrastructure of bias lurked the ever-present threat of violence. Peter Kolchin, author of one of the leading histories of slavery, suggests that violence against African Americans actually increased in the aftermath of slavery.
In a particularly damaging way, those African Americans who were most successful, and most important to the future success of the African American community, such as teachers, ministers, landowners, and politicians, were frequently targeted for attacks of all kinds.
By the end of the 19th century, with the last vestiges of Reconstruction firmly buried, racial discrimination and white superiority were deeply entrenched in both law and custom throughout the South. By the 1890s, the term “Jim Crow,” derived from the character in a minstrel show famous before the Civil War, had come into popular use to describe a system of “subordination and separation of black people in the South, much of it codified and much of it still enforced by custom, habit, and violence.”
In 1896, in perhaps its darkest moment since the Dred Scott case, in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court upheld a Louisiana law mandating segregated railroad cars, ruling that public facilities for black and white people could be “separate but equal.” Two years later, the Court upheld a Mississippi law designed to restrict the right of black men to vote. The second era of Southern racial oppression was at its height.
By 1901, John Knox could open the convention to rewrite Alabama’s constitution with the declaration that their job was to “within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution, to establish white supremacy in this state.” As Kolchin put it, “An uninformed observer of the South in 1910 might well be pardoned if he or she concluded that the Confederates had won the Civil War.”
The first decades of the 20th century brought with them a further tide of discrimination and oppression for African Americans. Murder, arson, and mutilation were common practices. In some cases, entire towns of African Americans were attacked: Longview, Texas, in 1919, for instance; the black portion of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921; and Rosewood, Florida, in 1923.
By the mid-1920s, the Ku Klux Klan had an estimated membership of more than four million and chapters in every state. Its members included governors, congressmen, and senators. In August 1925, some 40,000 Klansmen paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. It wasn’t until the 1930s, when the Klan’s reputation for violence — and a sex scandal among its leadership — brought about its decline.
Of course, even with the Klan in decline, the subjugation of African Americans continued. Indeed, the more insidious and damaging forms of racial prejudice most frequently took place in the day-to-day interactions of life, in jobs, accommodations, housing, and a thousand other ways that African Americans were denied their full rights as citizens.
For example, despite the fact that most northern states, with the conspicuous exception of Indiana, prohibited explicit school segregation, many local school districts were effectively segregated. Certainly, housing remained segregated even in the North, often enforced through racially discriminatory zoning laws. In 1920, 36 states had laws against interracial marriage, and nearly half of those laws were in place into the 1950s. Racism and its consequences affected African Americans no matter where they lived.
Eventually, of course, African Americans — and sympathetic white people— organized into a powerful movement for equality and civil rights.
The Civil Rights Era culminated in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, followed by the Voting Rights Act in 1965. At least on paper, discrimination in both governmental institutions and public accommodations was outlawed, and the right to vote was guaranteed. Jim Crow was illegal, if not exactly dead. But, as we shall see, its legacy lives on.
Obviously, it is difficult if not impossible to draw a straight line between any particular act of racism, past or present, and African American poverty. But as in a criminal trial, the weight of circumstantial evidence can accumulate to where the relationship seems clear beyond a reasonable doubt. The circumstantial case that racism has been—and continues to be—a factor in black poverty is a strong one.
Start with the legacy of past racism. That is to say that, even if overt discrimination has greatly diminished today, the consequences of past discrimination are still with us. You cannot hold a marathon in which one runner is loaded down with weights and chains for half the race, remove them, and suggest that from then on it is a fair contest.
To look at just one example, consider the impact of historical racism on the accumulation of wealth. Wealth is not just an amount of money that can be used to buy things, but, as Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro wrote in their seminal book, Black Wealth/White Wealth:
[I]t is used to create opportunities, secure a desired stature and standard of living, and pass class status on to one’s children . . . the command of resources that wealth entails is more encompassing than is income or education, and closer in meaning and theoretical significance to our traditional notions of economic well-being and access to life chances.
African Americans have been systematically deprived of the ability to accumulate wealth. In addition to a deprivation of basic liberty, and all the physical and psychological horrors described above, slavery was also a massive theft of African American labor, wages, and wealth.
Libertarian economist Julian Simon teamed with Larry Neal of the University of Illinois to calculate the value of unpaid wages to slaves — minus maintenance costs such as food and shelter provided by slave owners — at $1.4 trillion. Assuming a five percent rate of interest accruing since those wages were earned would yield a debt of roughly $6.5 trillion. Using a slightly different methodology, economic historian James Marketti calculated the value of lost wages at roughly $2.1 trillion, or $10 trillion today assuming accumulated interest. Add in pain and suffering, lost educational and wealth-building opportunities, and we are rapidly approaching numbers that are nearly impossible to comprehend.
One needn’t go that far back to see how racism has denied African Americans opportunities to build wealth. For most American families, their house is the largest single component of their savings. Just 44.9 percent of African American families own their own home, the lowest homeownership rate of any racial category, and almost 30 percentage points lower than white homeownership. This is not just the result of chance. Nor is it the consequence of lower incomes among African Americans.
At one time, the National Association of Real Estate Boards actually included in its code of ethics a provision warning realtors against “introducing into a neighborhood . . . any race or nationality . . . whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values.” One brochure issued by the organization listed among the undesirables who should not be able to purchase homes: madams, bootleggers, gangsters, and “a colored man . . . who thought they were entitled to live among whites.”
Such private discrimination was backed by the federal government. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), a government agency created as part of the New Deal to provide low-interest mortgages, insisted that any property it covered must include a clause in the deed forbidding the property’s resale to nonwhites. The HOLC went so far as to draw up color-coded maps ranking American communities on the basis of which ones had too many “inharmonious racial groups.” Areas with large numbers of African Americans were typically outlined in red, hence the term “redlining.”
Even the G.I. Bill, which opened the door to homeownership for millions of white families, failed to have the same effect for African Americans. Although the law was facially neutral with regard to race, its implementation was so problematic that in her book on the topic, Berkeley historian Kathleen Frydl claims that “black veterans did not experience the same G.I. Bill as white veterans . . . this result did not stem from any direct discrimination in the Bill itself. It was a feature of its implementation – and an intended one.”
Long after these more blatant types of discrimination faded or were prohibited, more subtle forms of redlining remained, defined as the practice of denying or limiting financial services to certain neighborhoods based on racial or ethnic composition without regard to the residents’ qualifications or creditworthiness. The practice was not formally out- lawed until the Fair Housing Act in 1968. As discussed below, housing discrimination continues to be a problem today.
As Oliver and Shapiro point out:
Locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history, African Americans who desired or were able to afford home ownership found themselves confined to central-city communities where their investments were affected by the “self-fulfilling prophecies” of FHA appraisers: cut off from sources of new investment, their homes and communities deteriorated and lost value in comparison to those homes that FHA appraisers deemed desirable.
This legacy of discrimination still has fallout today. After all, if your family was denied a mortgage in the past because of redlining or other discriminatory practices, then you may not have the family wealth or down payment help to become a homeowner today. The legacy of housing discrimination may also force African Americans into neighborhoods with poor schools or fewer job opportunities, both of which can increase poverty levels.
Similarly, the fact that African Americans were long denied equal employment opportunities means that black families were not able to build either financial or social capital to the same degree as their white peers. As late as 1960, help wanted ads in major newspapers like the Washington Post, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times separated job opportunities by race, lumped African American men with boys, and directed African Americans toward menial work. Thus a typical job listing read:
BOYS—WHITE Age 14 to 18. To assist Route manager full or part-time. Must be neat in appearance. Apply 1346 Conn. Ave. NW.
DRIVERS (TRUCK) Colored, for trash routes, over 25 years of age; paid vacation, year-around work; must have excellent driving record. Apply . . . 1601 W St., N.E.
STUDENTS Boys, white, 14 yrs. and over, jobs immediately available. Apply . . . 724 9th St., N.W.
One study, by Bernadette and Gerald Chachere of Berkeley — included in a collection of works titled The Wealth of Races: The Present Value of Benefits from Past Injustices — estimated that labor market discrimination cost black Americans $1.6 trillion between 1929 and 1969 alone.
It should be obvious that the racism that denied previous generations of African Americans an equal shot at homeownership or high-paying jobs has meant that the current generation has started in a deeper hole than it would absent that history of discrimination.
Finally, consider the impact of discrimination on education. There is a clear gap in educational achievement based on race, with African Americans lagging whites on almost all measures of educational attainment. There are significant historical roots to this gap.
During slavery, the education of African Americans was actively discouraged where it was not expressly prohibited. From 1835 to 1865, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia had laws making it a crime to teach a slave to read or write. Other states had similar laws for short periods, although enforcement was often haphazard.
After slavery ended, African Americans were largely confined to segregated schools, often underfunded compared with white schools. It wasn’t until 1954 that “separate but equal” was declared unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education. Moreover, as welcome as the Supreme Court’s decision was, it hardly ushered in an age of educational equality. Many southern and border states did everything in their power to resist desegregating the schools.
Human capital, in the form of education, is passed down as an inheritance as surely as financial capital. For example, a sociological study conducted in 1940 by E. Horace Fitchett found that more than half of Howard University students were descended from the small elite group of literate slaves. Similarly, a 1963 study by Horace Mann Bond found that a startlingly large share of black intellectuals and professionals could trace their ancestry to the roughly 10 percent of African Americans who were free in 1860 and were therefore disproportionately likely to be educated. A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that in a counterfactual world, where school quality was equal across races in the South during the first half of the 20th century, the wage gap between black and white people would have been roughly halved.
As much as we may wish to pretend that America is a meritocracy, it is entirely unreasonable to suggest that this legacy of racism has had no impact on the number of African Americans living in poverty.
Second, African Americans continue to deal with racism today. Few white Americans use racial slurs in public anymore and “colored only” signs are now museum relics, but African Americans are still not treated with full equality in housing, employment, or the criminal justice system, among other areas. In some cases this bias may be unconscious, a set of stereotypes and other race-based ideas that have been internalized by the white population generally. In other cases, a smaller group of Americans may still possess overtly racist attitudes, even if they tend to hide those beliefs to avoid social censure.
Next let us consider employment, an area in which racial prejudice can rather obviously lead to poverty. By and large, African Americans remain “last hired, first fired.” Historically, African American unemployment has been roughly double that of whites since at least the mid-1950s, when the U.S. Department of Labor first started collecting unemployment data by race. Today, white unemployment is roughly three percent, while unemployment for African Americans approaches six percent.
Studies also show that when hired, African Americans may receive lower wages. Black median weekly earnings are roughly 80 percent of white median weekly earnings. There are many factors that account for this gap, including education, pre-job skills, and previous employment experience. However, one study from Roland G. Fryer Jr. and colleagues estimated that differential treatment, or discrimination, explained at least one-third of the raw black–white wage gap.
A study from the Economic Policy Institute found that such widely cited factors as job preferences and differences in both technical competencies and so-called soft-skills are insufficient to account for the gap in black and white employment. Similarly, a study by the Center for American Progress found that, holding factors such as age, education, and sex constant, higher unemployment rates for African Americans persist. These findings suggest that some portion of the black–white employment gap is the result of discrimination.
Other evidence comes from a study by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan in the American Economic Review. They replied to advertisements for jobs listed in Boston and Chicago newspapers using resumes that were functionally equivalent except for the applicants’ names, which were randomly divided between African American– or white-sounding names. White names received 50 percent more callbacks for interviews across a cross-section of occupations, industries, and employer sizes. A similar study by Michael Gaddis of Pennsylvania State University likewise found that employers were more likely to call back job applicants with white-sounding names than those with black-sounding names even if the black applicant had graduated from an elite university while the white applicant attended a less selective college. Moreover, when black applicants were called back, it was often for jobs with lower starting salaries and lower prestige than white applicants.
Housing is another area where racial discrimination persists. Studies, similar to the correspondence study on employment discussed previously — and subject to the same caveats — show that mortgage loan originators responded less favorably to inquiries from individuals with black-sounding names. In fact, according to one study, having a black-sounding name had the same effect as having a credit score 71 points lower than white applicants for response rates from mortgage loan originators.
A study by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development found that black home buyers were, on average, shown fewer home options than similar white families. A similar investigation, by the National Fair Housing Alliance, tested realtors in a dozen metropolitan areas, including Atlanta, Austin, Birmingham, Chicago, Dayton, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Antonio, and the District of Columbia, using African American home buyers with higher incomes, better credit scores, and more savings for down payments than whites in the study. They found that black buyers “were shown fewer homes than their white peers, were often denied information about special incentives that would have made the purchase easier, and were required to produce loan pre-approval letters and other documents when whites were not.” This was the case even when the black applicants were “better qualified financially.”
But perhaps no segment of American society remains as racially biased as the criminal justice system. As detailed in chapter 6, African Americans encounter disparate treatment at every level, from street-level law enforcement, to arrest, to trial, to incarceration. The treatment of African Americans throughout the criminal justice system is so blatant and so damaging that author Michelle Alexander termed it “The New Jim Crow.”
This mistreatment of African Americans by the criminal justice system has profound consequences in terms of black poverty. First, simply removing such a large number of young black men from the community changes the situation. According to the New York Times, for every 100 black women ages 25 to 50 and not in jail in America, there are just 83 black men. That amounts to roughly 1.5 million “missing” black men. Premature death accounts for a portion of the difference, but mass incarceration is the single biggest reason. And in inner cities and high-poverty areas, this depopulation is even more extreme. Wilson, in particular, has written extensively on how the lack of marriageable men in poor, minority communities pushes women into poverty.
But the racial disparities in the criminal justice system have consequences beyond merely locking up large numbers of young black men. As Alexander points out, even after they are released from jail,
They’re relegated to a permanent second-class status, stripped of the very rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement—such as the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, the right to be free of legal discrimination in employment, and access to education and public benefits. Many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind during the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again, once you’ve been branded a felon.
For instance, roughly one-quarter of all non-incarcerated black men have a criminal record. The overwhelming preponderance of the academic literature suggests that employers are, not surprisingly, reluctant to hire those with a criminal history. This includes surveys that track the employment of offenders before and after incarceration, surveys of employer attitudes about hiring job applicants with criminal records, tests of how employers treat applicants with otherwise identical resumes if one has a criminal record, and administrative data comparing employment outcomes for demographic groups with different incarceration rates.
It seems fair to say, then, that the injustices in the criminal justice system have consequences for African American employment. Those consequences extend to education, housing, and even marriage rates.
Third, we need to consider the effect of both past and current racism on African American psychology and culture. The effect shows up both in the economic starting point for black families and psychologically in African American hopes, ambitions, and relationships with larger society. Studies point out that experiencing racism can be akin to other psychologically traumatic experiences. Experiencing racism has been linked to such symptoms as intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, difficulty concentrating, irritability, and jumpiness. Some have even suggested that the psychological response to racism can resemble post-traumatic stress disorder. Others have likened the response of those experiencing acts of racism to the response of rape victims. In particular, victims of racism may experience feelings of powerlessness and hypervigilance, which may subsequently affect how African Americans respond in interactions with teachers, the police, and others, making it more difficult to escape poverty and participate in mainstream economic activities.
One need not go that far to realize that there are psychological consequences from racism. As Orlando Patterson of Harvard explains, “Inner city youth live in an all-black world, a world that is completely marginalized economically and socially, and as such, being black is inevitably perceived as being in some critical way the source of their marginality and failure. The stigma of being a young black person is made immediately obvious to them the moment they walk out of their inner city and try to enter mainstream space.” Patterson points out that, even though African Americans are not generally inclined to attribute particular failings to racial discrimination, racism still leaves many African Americans with a negative assessment of their own racial identity.
Finally, we should acknowledge that racially based stereotypes may affect both public policy and private behavior in ways that disadvantage African Americans. As discussed earlier, an entire mythology was developed to justify slavery, and many of those ideas were carried forward in slavery’s aftermath to justify the continued oppression of black people. Eventually, such stereotypes as the oversexed, promiscuous black woman and the dangerous brute black man became ingrained in the popular consciousness.
While recent polling finds that only seven percent of American voters report having favorable attitudes toward white supremacists, such explicit racial animosity may merely be the tip of the iceberg. For example, according to the 2020 General Social Survey, roughly 30 percent of whites believe that the disadvantages experienced by African Americans are because blacks “don’t have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves up out of poverty.”
We should be careful, however, not to present the structural causes of poverty in a way that reduces African Americans to helpless passivity, stripping them of agency, choice, or responsibility. We should recall that even in times of oppression, African Americans raised families, educated themselves, started businesses, and formed charitable societies to care for themselves in hard times. Many became scholars, business owners or executives, politicians, and leaders in all manner of fields.
In fact, black poverty declined during some of the times of greatest racial hostility and discrimination. The National Research Council estimates that in 1939 as many as 93 percent of African Americans were poor, compared with 65 percent of whites. This estimation may somewhat overstate the typical level of black poverty since it represents a point at the end of the Great Depression when poverty was especially high among all groups. Still, it’s worth pointing out that by the time that the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, black poverty had declined by nearly two-thirds to just 42 percent. That so many African Americans were able to rise above Jim Crow is a testimony to the human spirit that should not be ignored.
There is no honest way to look at poverty without seeing that racism and other malign social influences have been contributory factors. As much as we might wish it otherwise, the playing field has not been — and still is not — level. Any effort to combat poverty and increase economic opportunity will need to take a hard look at those issues.
This situation does not mean that individual choices or behavior plays no role. No matter the circumstances, individuals always possess agency and have responsibility for their own lives. But we cannot ignore the context in which those choices take place.
*The concept of race is itself a problematic one. In reality, race is largely a social construct. Racial categories may be drawn in different ways at different times and in different places. For example, under the “one drop” rule prevalent in the pre–Civil Rights era southern United States, a person could be defined as black based on a single African American ancestor, regardless of whether the person displayed any physical characteristics associated with African Americans. Nor do racial classifications necessarily reflect racial discrimination or oppression. They may be nothing more than classifications linked to biological descent or an easy description of physical appearance. However, in practice, they are too often linked to disparities in treatment and injustice, especially when different groups have different degrees of access to the levers of power. For purposes of this book, African Americans are generally defined as those perceived as African American and subject to social and legal treatment as such.
**The link between race and poverty may seem so pervasive that it could seem as if the term African American is frequently being used as a synonym for poverty. That is not my intent…. As Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, put it, “Black America has deep problems — deep economic problems — but black America also has a large community of striving, successful, hardworking people; college educated, in the work force.” That said, there is no doubt that people of color are disproportionately likely to be poor. This fact means it is difficult to disentangle the issue of poverty from this country’s long history of racial discrimination. It also means African American poverty has been a particular focus of much poverty research. For both good reasons and bad, debates over poverty policy in this country have long been viewed through a racial lens.
