Lying Back at the Numbers

A number of years ago Sports Illustrated did an article on the emerging fighter Sugar Ray Leonard and how he might be helped and hindered with regard to marketing himself to white America. One factor, deemed a negative by the writer, was Leonard's illegitimate daughter whose picture he flaunted on his sock during bouts. A mitigating factor, it was offered, was that within the black community this was quite common--over 70% of kids were illegitimate--and that might soften the effect among white Americans. The following week several letters to the editor proclaimed outrage of what they perceived as a misprint; it was inconceivable to them that 70% of black children were illegitimate. It must have been 7%.

It was indeed 70% and still is. There is, however, a part of us that has difficulty with the astonishing. Facts outside our norms are not dealt with well and often just ignored or forgotten, like a bad date or an unpleasant illness. So it is with the recent statistics on net worth of families. According to PEW Research (maybe with an ax to grind) the median net worth of white households in 2007 was $134,992, in 2009 it was $113,149. The median net worth of black families was $12,124 in 2007 and in 2009 it was $5,677. Net worth not income; assets minus debt.

These are numbers that most will see and squeamishly look away. An objective person must look on these numbers with horror. Initially some will point out the discrepancies, of course, and call to the barricades. Some will muse this kind of disparity will be socially destabilizing, although being on the lower end of the scale in America has little connection to poverty when seen in a broader geographical--or temporal--framework. Moreover inequality always exists, if and how it becomes destabilizing appears no more defined than coffee house surmise.

But there is a real and obvious problem here that has nothing to do with comparisons. The black community has amassed no wealth. They clearly are living from check to check. They have no savings, no fallback position in a crisis, nothing for a down payment, no extra money for a luxury, no extra money for school, no money for a rainy day. A dental bill is more than a problem, a fender bender a disaster. Most of all, all of the country's discussions must be obscure to them. Taxes are meaningless, interest rates do not apply, the housing market an abstraction, savings and the very notion of self denial towards a desired end--a concept most Americans would think inherent to the nation--the stuff of a foreign culture. Somehow the black community has managed to live in a nation of great flux, immigrants coming and going, with mandatory affirmative action and have remained separate from the basic heart of the country.

The only thing more numbing is how this came about and where it is going.