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African Americans: Children of a Lesser Economic God

2020-10-25T00:41:57.242Z


The marginalization of this group costs the United States 13.6 billion euros so far this centuryA woman poses with her three children in an African-American neighborhood in Miami (USA) .CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP / GETTY IMAGES The history of the United States is, to a certain extent, the history of racism. A fracture that still runs through his spine and that in 1964 the leader of the civil movements Malcolm X (1925-1965) denounced with the sincerity of someone who has suffered from it for decad


A woman poses with her three children in an African-American neighborhood in Miami (USA) .CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP / GETTY IMAGES

The history of the United States is, to a certain extent, the history of racism.

A fracture that still runs through his spine and that in 1964 the leader of the civil movements Malcolm X (1925-1965) denounced with the sincerity of someone who has suffered from it for decades.

“If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there is no progress.

If you extract it completely, there is no progress.

Progress is healing the wound that caused the stab.

And they haven't even drawn the knife, much less healed the wound.

They won't even admit that the knife was there. "

A year later he would die riddled with 21 shots in Manhattan.

The New York Times

wrote in its obituary that he was "an extraordinary and twisted man", capable of "using many true gifts for evil purposes."

Racism transforms the stripes of the American flag into bars and the stars into potholes.

It is a structural problem.

"George Washington and Thomas Jefferson [two of the Founding Fathers] owned slaves, and the Constitution of 1787 counted enslaved African Americans as three-fifths of a person for representation purposes," says Mario L. Small, professor of sociology. at Harvard University.

Certainly, in this time, there have been improvements, but 155 years after Emancipation Day, eight generations later, the divide in racial wealth is immense.

Universities, public institutions and banks have started to draw equations of the price of this suffering.

So far this century, racism has cost the US economy - according to a 104-page report by Citigroup - $ 16 trillion (about € 13.6 trillion).

“The past never dies.

There is not even the past, ”wrote William Faulkner.

Past and present injustices pour out like a waterfall.

The classic black family only has one-tenth the wealth of the typical white family.

The 2016 Federal Reserve calculation is a sample of those wasted lives.

We are talking about a wealth of $ 171,000 for white families compared to 17,600 for black.

And it can be even worse.

One fifth of African American families have net worth of zero dollars or less.

75% barely have $ 10,000 to retire.

Whites - according to Citigroup - own 80% of their houses, blacks only 47%.

And crime, it would seem, is its main heritage.

Blacks are five times more likely to end up in jail and account for slightly more than 33% of inmates, despite only representing 12% of the country's population.

Without a doubt, 400 years of slavery of black populations still have an effect on daily life.

Closing the inequality in investment, education, real estate, wages could boost - according to Citi - the country's GDP by five trillion dollars over the next five years.

Echoes of slavery

But the numbers are boats pulled against the current of reality.

“The spirit of slavery lives on in white economic supremacy.

An economic system that robs black Americans of wealth and income and persists in widening, not narrowing, the inequality gap.

There are echoes of that slavery in the mass incarceration of black and Latino people and through unpaid or abusive prison work, ”criticizes Calvin Schermerhorn, a history professor and expert on slavery at Arizona State University.

The teacher proposes not to forget what Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, calls "predatory inclusion."

The stocks catch without noise.

"Welcome black participation in economic activities and then punish that entry with high interest rates and formulas that rob them of their income and wealth," Schermerhorn warns.

The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates calls it "silent looting."

A game with tricked dice.

"Black faces the white man's standard, without the white man's opportunity," complained black mathematician Kelly Miller in 1930.

Despite the improvements, "it is a systemic problem," admits Mauro Guillén, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Appears in unexpected voices.

A reminder that the past is never another country.

Nobel laureate George Stigler (1911-1991) argued (The Problem of the Negro. New Guard) in 1965 that black people were inferior as workers and that the solution lay in fostering "the will to hard work."

The injustice of those words is built above all in the real estate space.

The value of the house will depend on the quality of the neighborhood or the public school where black children attend.

And econometrics whips them like mistral.

Black homeowners had the least real estate wealth in 2016. About $ 124,000 versus $ 200,000 for white families or 158,000 for Hispanics.

Numbers that give off questions.

"President, my last name is Pérez, on which side of the wall you are building should I be?"

-(Silence)

This is the question that Jorge Pérez, owner of Related Group, a Democrat and one of the richest Latinos in the world (1.7 billion dollars, according to Forbes), asked his former partner and friend Donald Trump a few months ago.

Pérez, born in Argentina and raised in Colombia, is, through his Miami-based company, the leading real estate developer on the east coast of the United States.

The situation has improved - he qualifies - referring above all to Florida.

"But still, unfortunately, there are cases where they deny the rent of an apartment to a black person with the excuse of being occupied, but if a white client arrives they rent it to him", describes the businessman.

“And also, getting mortgages is more difficult in black neighborhoods.

Much remains to be done ”, he laments.

The gap in home ownership rates is bigger today than it was in the 1950s or 1960s. That's decades of lost real estate appreciation (black wealth).

Behind them there is misery in living conditions.

The police killings this year of three black Americans, George Floyd, BreonnaTaylor, and Ahmaud Arbery and the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement demonstrate that the problem has taken root in the soul of the nation.

Direct and indirect exposure to police brutality, immigration service raids, or the separation of families at the border undermine the commitment to work of black employees.

Especially when they are excluded from the dialogue about their own well-being.

Everything starts in education and everything fails in education.

The presence of black students in universities is ten points below the national average.

“Education is the key vehicle for leveling opportunities around the world.

Yet in the United States, educational inequity is deep and historic and firmly rooted in basic education, ”observes Timothy Knowles, founder of the Academy Group, a company working to close the gap.

“A key reason is that schools are largely funded by property taxes.

This means that the wealthiest American communities have the best-funded public schools.

And vice versa".

The result is that injustice sits on the desks.

Those who most need training have worse facilities, teachers with less experience and a lack of basic teachings such as languages, art or advanced courses.

“From day one in kindergarten through high school, African American, Latino and Indian youth face enormous obstacles, none of them destined to their educational success,” says Knowles.

If the chains were broken, if blacks accessed - according to Citi - higher education, their income during their life would increase between 90,000 and 113,000 million dollars.

But white (and straight) elites have paved the way.

Recent Harvard work revealed that 43% of white students were admitted for their bequests or donations.

If they had taken into account the grades or the merits, only 26% would have agreed.

Again the powerful erecting barbed wire over their privileges.

The motto "The Land of Opportunity" rings hollow when struck.

Last February - according to a Bank of America note - unemployment rates were distributed as follows: African Americans (5.8%), Hispanics (4.4%) and whites (3.1%).

In April, with Covid-19 out of control, unemployment further reflected that broken soul.

Hispanic (18.9%), African American (16.7%), and White (14.2%).

Tips without diversity

The cards change, but the play is always the same.

Only 9% of the advisors on the Fortune 500 are black.

The absence of diversity continues to obscure the American dream despite some improvements.

“During the past year we have used our voting rights as shareholders in company meetings to achieve greater diversity on company boards in the United States, and we are seeing results,” says Lucía Catalán, CEO of Goldman Sachs AM for Iberia and Latin America.

However, finance is Wall Street and that street is white and masculine.

38% of black employees - although they represent only 11% of the country's workforce - earn the minimum wage.

In addition, they will inherit less than Hispanics and whites, and only 1% are business angels.

Evidence of the difficulty of accessing financing.

This is the terrain where Wole Coaxum, a former CEO of JP Morgan Chase, fights, who changed his entire life when a white police officer murdered 18-year-old Michael Brown, an unarmed boy, in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.

"We believe that systemic injustices can be resolved by first addressing the economic disproportions that keep millions of Americans without banking services, in communities that limit the number of bank branches that can be accessed," he recounts as the founder of MoCaFi, a company emerging market that brings free or highly affordable financial services to low-income people.

As many as 55 million Americans do not have bank accounts and, for example, have not been able to benefit from federal aid for covid-19.

"A deprivation of their rights", criticizes.

And, also, of another future.

If black entrepreneurs had equal access to finance, they could generate $ 13 trillion in revenue over the next two decades.

But those are numbers on a computer.

The reality is different: they are dying for a dream.

African Americans have been hardest hit by the pandemic.

His death rate - documents CNN - is 2.4 times higher than that of a white worker.

Basically because they have been more exposed to jobs that are impossible to do from home.

And the system has cornered them.

“African Americans and Hispanics are less likely to receive optimal health care, which affects not only them but their families, their communities;

to the nation, ”reflects John Z. Ayanian, Professor of Medicine and Director of Health Policy at the University of Michigan.

Darkness envelops the country between both coasts.

The escalators to the middle class have stopped for blacks, and the economic rung where you start is almost certainly where you end.

That land that Woody Guthrie sang was "made for you and me" seeks solutions.

One is reparation for decades of slavery.

Professor Thomas Craemer of the University of Connecticut has estimated the cost at $ 14 trillion (12 trillion euros).

Another dream?

"I don't think it is impossible to achieve a national reparations program for the descendants of black Americans from American slavery," analyzes folklorist A. Kirsten Mullen.

And he ends: "Ours is a great country capable of doing incredible things."

That hope that comes from the Founding Fathers has prevented a further fracture.

You need low interest rates and forget about inflation, promote financial inclusion, progressive taxation, increase the minimum wage for blacks, take baby bonds seriously (an amount that the Government would give annually to children at birth and even adulthood) and pay off debt for black graduates.

And force to respect the difference.

“It is commendable to work to change the mentality of the people but, in the current situation of the country, the impact of these strategies will surely be small.

Much more important are the institutions: not only the laws that penalize unequal treatment, but also harsh enforcement and severe penalties for doing so, ”says Mario L. Small, a professor at Harvard.

The European case

Because the gap transcends the economy.

The past doesn't even exist.

“When American abolitionists defended freedom, they argued that it was in the economic interest of the nation to end slavery.

If this argument, by itself, had been true, we would not have needed a Civil War to establish it, "criticizes in Bloomberg Caitlin Rosenthal, professor of history at the University of Berkeley.

Europe never had a common dream and it was never a promised land.

But there is no global data on racism.

For historical reasons, Germany and France, the two largest European economies, do not provide ethnic information.

We know little about whether they are questioned more by the police, if they suffer harassment, if they have labor difficulties.

Without precise figures, the problem does not disappear but is hidden.

Margaritis Schinas, vice president of the European Commission, whose objective is "to promote the European way of life" (as it sounds) has declared - as the Guardian reports - that the police brutality we have seen in the United States would be "unlikely" in Europe.

The phrase leaves many doubts in European countries that have a colonial and slave past.

It is not a scourge of the new world, also of the old.

The European Union has had a new Action Plan against Racism since September.

"This is a serious problem suffered by racial minorities in Europe and it is time for the Union to say: enough is enough", underlines Rafaela Samira, MEP, 31, Dutch, with a mother from Curaçao and a Nigerian father.

And he adds: "We also fail in our own institutions because there is a lack of diversity."

We failed in what the philosopher Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) called the "stench of racism."

Comments from bar bars, chatting with friends;

we spoil ourselves in everyday life.

It is clear, writes The Guardian, that since the 2015 refugee crisis and the jihadist terrorist attacks in Spain, France and Germany, Muslims have had a bad reputation in Europe.

52% of the German population see Islam as a threat.

And their lives get tough.

“Studies show that Muslims are systematically disadvantaged in the labor market.

An Arabic or Turkish name on the job application leads to fewer opportunities, especially when it comes to higher job titles, ”warns Yasemin El-Menouar, an expert at the Bertelsmann Stiftung foundation.

"And the situation for veiled women is even worse."

The French proposal to send CVs without photos and without surnames can help.

Because populisms and the extreme right set fire to anti-Semitism and hatred of Muslims.

“The economic cost [of this situation] is that inequalities often reflect ethnic and religious divisions.

And companies deny themselves labor or clients, or both, sometimes out of ignorance, due to prejudice, ”analyzes Patrycja Sasnal, head of research at the Polish Institute for International Affairs (PISM).

And Spain is not an "island" on these shores of injustice.

60% - according to Bertelsmann Stiftung - think that Islam is incompatible with "the West".

The increase in inequality, generated by the crisis, both before and after transfers from the public sector, mainly affected young people and immigrants.

"The workers with the most precarious contracts are the ones who suffer the most," says Josep Mestres, economist at CaixaBank Research.

After the pain is the dawn and the morning.

“Inequality fuels pessimism about the future.

And that sentiment gives forces to populism that at the same time erodes the democratic strength and the trust of citizens in the institutions and in the market system, which has brought us so many improvements in the quality of life in the last two centuries ”, he defends Ramón Pueyo, partner responsible for Sustainability and Corporate Governance of KPMG in Spain.

However, those 200 years have not passed the same for everyone.

In 1852, on July 5, one day after the celebration of Independence Day in the United States, Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist leader, spoke to the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society in New York: “Oh!

If I had the ability and could reach the ears of the nation today, I would pour out a torrent, a fiery cataract of scathing taunts, terrible reproaches, withering sarcasm, and severe reprimands.

For it is not light that is required, if not fire;

It is not the fine rain but thunder.

We need the storm, the whirlwind, the earthquake.

We must rekindle the feeling of the nation;

the conscience of the nation must be awakened;

the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed;

and crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and condemned ”.

Hope remains.

"Light penetrates where the sun does not shine."

Dylan Thomas.

At the mercy of the Federal Reserve

Racism is a problem that poisons the soul of the world.

Despite having exploded, in recent months, in the United States.

However, it is a fracture that falls on the original sins.

The genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of blacks and the theft of their lands have created the prosperity of the country.

A looting that enriched the whites and their heirs.

But also the Fed (Federal Reserve) and monetary policy, despite sounding like a hidden term in economics manuals, have failed them.



During the 1980s, former Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker fought inflation like the pandemic.

His great "achievement"?

"Each and every month the unemployment rate for blacks was over 10%," says William Spriggs, professor of economics at Howard University, in the Politico newspaper.

And he adds: "African Americans were forced to live an entire decade in depression."



The turnaround in the mid-1990s, with Alan Greenspan as Fed chairman, and the relaxation of inflation targets helped the lives of blacks.

It is no coincidence that the lowest level of unemployment of those times was reached in April 2000.



For this reason, Democratic leaders, led by Maxine Waters and Senator Elizabeth Warren, want the central bank to adopt stronger policies to close the gap salary and employment.

A mixture of memory and justice.

In a July note, Schroders analysts write: "If black voters are pushed [13% of the electorate] to vote on November 3, it could be the end of the Trump Administration."



But its fall would not be the decline of an empire of inequity.

Nor the white supremacist discourse that gangrenes the 50 states.

“I used to think that racism and supremacy and white privilege were veins in our limbs.

Now I think it is an aorta that runs through the heart of the nation.

The [Black Lives Matter] movement opened my eyes, whether or not I was stupidly naive before, ”says Bruce Springsteen in Rolling Stone magazine.



The road is hard paved.

"A Biden administration would be under pressure to acknowledge that there is systemic racism (a phrase that has only become common use this year), and it is not clear that there are widely accepted policy options that can be put in place quickly," he warns. Giles Alston, an expert at the Oxford Analytica consultancy.

However, the United States has little time.

Anger is fermenting.

Because either the economy changes, or black families will be poorer on the 175th anniversary of Emancipation than they were in 1980.



And those historical, but also recent, shackles not only chain black Americans.

In Europe only 15 of the 27 Member States have anti-segregation and often ineffective plans.

By the end of 2022 it will be an obligation of all the nations of the Union.

Racism, that trap created by man for man, must be broken.

“Existing economic mechanisms are creating oppressive systems that are based on and perpetuate segregation.



We have to recognize the structural inequalities within these systems and design a fair, inclusive and resilient economy that allows all people to live a dignified life, ”observes a spokesperson for the European Network Against Racism.

The philosopher Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) taught that the human being needs to find meaning, transcendence, in everything he does, if he is not doomed to resignation.

What better purpose than to destroy the ferment of those (just) grapes of wrath.

Source: elparis

All business articles on 2020-10-25

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