Recent economic, wealth and employment reports confirm what much of Black America already knows: We are in serious TROUBLE and multitudes of Black people exist in deep poverty. Many Black people in America are not just poor by American standards; many of us are third-world poor. Black Americans are in an economic free-fall with no fiscal backstop. Many Black Americans will live their entire lives without ever having a positive net worth. Most Black people today who work are like “sharecroppers”, men and families who did most or all of the work on a farm, but seldom earned enough to pay their debts and never owned anything of value.
While many economists praise the American economy with talk of low unemployment, record-housing starts and a booming GNP (gross national product), none of this tells the real story of the devastated Black economy within America. Recent data from the Pew Research Center shows the median wealth of Black households dropped an astonishing 34 percent from 2010 to 2013 while that of White households grew, albeit slightly, over that same period.
Pew’s research shows that when automobiles and other durable goods are included, the net worth of White families was $141,900 in 2013 while the net worth of Black families that year fell to $11,000, down from $19,000 in 2007. This means that two years ago White families had 13 times the wealth of Black families in America, a 24-year high for the wealth gap.