In 2009, for every dollar of wealth the average white household had, black households only had two cents.
Willful ignorance (via Amy Berg)
For African Americans, the last 50 years have been marked by extremely high unemployment occasionally interrupted by periods of merely high unemployment.
In fact, income inequality has gotten so extreme here that the US now ranks 93rd in the world in “income equality.” China’s ahead of us. So is India. So is Iran.
Here’s what the Wall Street protesters are so angry about (many more graphs at the link)
The amount the U.S. military spends annually on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan: $20.2 billion.
That’s more than NASA’s budget. It’s more than BP has paid so far for damage during the Gulf oil spill. It’s what the G-8 has pledged to help foster new democracies in Egypt and Tunisia.
In May, the number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for [six months or more]) increased by 361,000 to 6.2 million; their share of unemployment increased to 45.1 percent.
Bureau of Labor Statistics - Employment situation summary, June 3 2011
Over the past decade, real private-sector wage growth has scraped bottom at 4%, just below the 5% increase from 1929 to 1939, government data show.
10-year real wage gains worse than during the Great Depression
Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe that there are no jobs available for them. The number of discouraged workers in the U.S. increased sharply during the current recession, rising to 717,000 in the first quarter of 2009, a 70-percent increase from the first quarter of 2008. Relative to their share of the labor force, young people, blacks, and, to a lesser extent, Hispanics and men were over-represented among discouraged workers.
“Bad jobs” are typically considered those that pay low wages and do not include access to health insurance and pension benefits. As shown here, about 10% of full-time workers are in low-wage jobs, about 30% don’t have health insurance, and about 40% don’t have pensions. The graph also shows that the likelihood of being in a bad job is much worse for part-time workers, for on-call and day laborers, and for those working for temporary help agencies.
Uninsured children by poverty status, age, race and Hispanic origin
In 2007, 8.1 million children under 18 years old were without health insurance. Children in poverty and Hispanic children were more likely to be uninsured.
In the United States, 21.9 percent of all children are in poverty, a poverty rate second only to that of Mexico’s (among rich nations).
Women and men tend to work in very different occupations. And overall “men’s jobs” are better paid than “women’s jobs.”
An African-American child raised in a lower-class family is 37% less likely to become a professional basketball player than is an African-American child raised in a middle- or upper-class family.
Dubrow, J. & Adams, J. (2010). Hoop inequalities: Race, class and family structure background and the odds of playing in the National Basketball Association. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, November 2010.
(Source: web.hbr.org)
Both within each decade and across time, White respondents were more likely to see decreases in bias against Blacks as related to increases in bias against Whites—consistent with a zero-sum view of racism among Whites—whereas Blacks were less likely to see the two as linked.
Norton, M. & Sommers, S. (2011). Whites see racism as a zero-sum game that they are now losing. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(3), 215-218.
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