Friday, September 28, 2012

Can the Black Middle Class Survive: Obama Is in the Oval Office but the Black Bourgeoisie is Foundering


The article published earlier this month is from a website truth-out.org, it seems relevant to our general community often advertised as a black middle class area. Would like to hear your thoughts on this. I urge you to read the entire article beyond the excerpt I will post below:
And yet, when the Obamas moved into the White House, the country's economy was already in free fall, and its fragile black middle class was, to put it simply, vanishing. Between 2005 and 2009, the year the Great Recession officially ended, the average black household's wealth fell by more than half, to $5,677, even as their white peers held about $113,000 in assets. Nearly one-quarter of African-Americans have no assets besides a car, and roughly the same share have lost their homes, or they're close. The African-American unemployment rate hovers around 14 percent, and according to a Pew report released in July, nearly 70 percent of blacks raised in families at the middle of the wealth ladder fall to the bottom two rungs as adults. The exodus of blacks from cities like Washington, Atlanta, New Orleans and even Detroit is driving a sense of eroding political power. Perhaps most depressingly, one in three black boys can expect to be incarcerated at some point in his life.

It's tricky, explaining what it means to be black in America at this peculiar moment, mainly because the narrative's dominant theme is decline. "You're airing our dirty laundry," a black lawyer told me over brunch one recent Sunday, after I explained this story's theme. In the fall of 2009, shortly after I began a 14-month reporting assignment in Detroit for Time magazine, a black doctor threw a party at her sprawling home in the city's leafy Palmer Woods neighborhood, one of the last relatively affluent enclaves. Much of the region, particularly African-Americans, were outraged over the opening stories in our coverage, so the hostess, and her friends, wanted a word. The essential message: Inside Time's pages, pretend the black middle class is doing just fine.

It was delusional. Detroit is the country's most populous majority-black city. Historically, it's had one of America's highest black homeownership rates. But more than one-third of the city's black borrowers — including some of the martini-sipping doctors, lawyers, politicos and auto execs in the room that October night — have lost their homes, or they're on the brink. The truth is, many of us are on a cliff, watching this widening gulf of black poverty and dysfunction, fearful that we're just a heartbeat or two away.

Something is happening in the culture that conflicts with the dreamy image of black progress that Obama's presidency projects. In this supposedly post-racial moment, we no longer even have the license, or the language, to identify a fundamental source of the problems we see mounting in the offices in Chicago's Loop, and on the streets of suburban Orlando: the enduring effects of racism. That's no longer an acceptable explanation for society at large. Hardly anyone, it seems, wants to admit the truth: nearly a half-century of financial, political and social gains are being reversed, perhaps permanently, and the post-civil rights era may come to resemble Reconstruction's fleeting progress. "The whole premise of the civil rights movement was to give our children a better future than we had. But it's all going backwards," said Marian Wright Edelman, a veteran of that movement, adding: "We face the worst crisis since slavery."
Again read the whole thing and PLEASE share YOUR thoughts here!

1 comment:

  1. This is one of the most powerfully sad articles you have ever posted. I addressed this exact issue in April.


    The image of Black America has been SEVERELY and almost PERMANENTLY ruined by the idiots in our race:

    In the 1950's and early 1960's, the image of a Black American was clean cut, proper English speaking, education minded, hard working, and having a stable family unit.

    Today, that image has been replaced with the GHETTO culture of dirty, ebonics speaking, broken families with out-of-wedlock births somewhere between 80% to 95%, pants hanging off the buttocks of unemployable Black men, Black women relying solely on Government Money because they can't provide for their multiple kids by multiple fathers, obesity around 80%, almost universal diabetes & other health problems, hating education, and just proud ignorance.

    If this negative image was around during the Civil Rights era, NOTHING would have been accomplished, as is the case NOW!


    Blacks are being relegated to an Irrelevant status, and I fear the next step could be far worse!


    Reading this article, what should we do?


    1. Good Blacks MUST separate from the Bad Blacks.

    A conservative talk show host coined this phrase:
    "Help The Helpless! Forget The Clueless!"

    I take it a step further:
    "Help The Helpless, F@#$ the Clueless, Throw The Clueless In Jail Or Send Them To The Grave Through An Approved Concealed Carry Law When They Get Violently Angry With You For No Longer Wasting Time With Them And They Want To Forcefully Take What You Worked Hard To Obtain!"

    No Exceptions!


    2. Diversify Our Votes

    The old saying, "All politics are local", is so true.

    Black life is terrible in this area, exclusively run by the Democratic Machine. Republicans run NOTHING in Chicago, Cook County, and Illinois. Yet, our greatest fear is a Republican in local office?

    STUPID!!!

    Get over your fear of Republicans, and make both parties work for your vote. Otherwise, one party ignores you, and the other party screws you over big time.

    And be very skeptical about Third Parties. They almost never win, and it really is a WASTED vote! Yeah, I said it, WASTED (to hell with the Politically Correct response).


    3. Entrepreneurship

    If no one wants to employ us, then we should start our own businesses.

    Yes, I know that access to capital is limited to Blacks, but it's not an excuse. Figure out a way to finance your business. Use the Bartering System (save money by trading services with others), work another job, do freelance work, start a low-cost business on the internet, etc.


    4. Invest in Tangible Assets
    Gold, Silver, etc.
    Even Real-Estate has some viability (people who lose their homes have to live somewhere).


    5. Fight For Your Rights

    If you have done everything right, and you still face discrimination, then FIGHT BACK with a severe intensity. At the end of the day, just because the image of today's Blacks is negative, it is NO Excuse for others groups to treat you wrong when you have shown them that you are not a savage! But remember, in order to be "in the right", you can't do wrong and make excuses for your actions.


    Of course, like always, Black people will completely ignore what I've said here and turn to useless "Messiahs" for guidance.


    By the way, if anyone disputes what I've written, let's debate it.
    If anyone agrees with me, let's hear it.
    Either way, let's hear what you have to say.

    ReplyDelete

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