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[Wulfric]

I don't want to be a debbie downer today, but the headline of this article was too outrageous for me not to look into. According to a new study by the think tank Demos, white single parent households have nearly double the wealth of a two parent black or latino family. On a more troubling note, obtaining a college degree doesn't resolve the wealth gap between white graduates and blacks or latinos graduates. As shown in a quote from the study:

Attending college is associated with wealth in a number of ways. A college education has long been heralded as a ladder of social mobility: graduates who earn a bachelor's degree or other college certification are more likely to be employed and generally have higher earning power than high school graduates or dropouts; they can use their higher incomes to build savings and wealth. Indeed, research consistently finds that college graduates of every race and ethnicity have greater income and wealth than their counterparts who did not graduate college.

Yet wealth also plays a role in determining who attends college in the first place, and how much debt students must take on to get a degree. In effect, education can generate a ”wealth feedback loop," as parents' level of education and wealth significantly predicts the level of education their children will complete. Thus, the educational and wealth-building opportunities directly denied to people of color in past generations continue to reverberate in the lives of their children, even those whose educational achievements open up opportunities for well-paid employment opportunities.

I found the disparity between a two parent white household versus a one white parent family quite jarring as well. The real kicker is in the study's conclusion; they cite a Pew Study where "lack of motivation to work hard" is a reason black Americans are behind as a view held by 30% of white respondents, and an even greater number of black respondents at 43%. As a latino, this is a subject that is always in the back of my mind. I have a few relatives with their master's and PhDs, and they have told me in no uncertain terms the hurdles they faced earning their degrees as late as the 00s. In my own academic career, I've been pulled aside by a concerned English professor despite my grades being nowhere near poor in his class. And let's not forget the student who assumed I'm a part of the cleaning staff; that definitely ruined my mood that day. Anyways, I just wanted to share this, because it totally caught me off guard. If education isn't the great equalizer, then what is? Black and latino families simply haven't had that many generations to build up wealth and education. My grandparents (all 4 of them) were farmers, and my father was the sole earner as an electrician. He's not doing bad at 70k in the midwest, but he could be earning more if he had joined the trade earlier. My nightmare is finishing my bachelor's degree and somehow earning less than my parents. Whatever I do end up earning, the money certainly won't stretch as far as it did in the 90s when my parents married.

Sources: http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswi...-have-half-the-wealth-of-white-single-parents

http://www.demos.org/publication/asset-value-whiteness-understanding-racial-wealth-gap

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2016/06/ST_2016.06.27_Race-Inequality-Final.pdf

The full paper can be found here.

 

[Ninja Scooter]

But I thought they were the ones with economic anxiety?

 

[daffy]

Who will survive in america

 

[Chie Satonaka]

Working as designed.

 

[Zyae]

Good thing those demographics didnt turn out to vote in 2016.

 

[excelsiorlef]

And then there's fucked up stats like this to boot:

The new research by scholars at the Stanford Graduate School of Education found that the gap separating black and Hispanic neighborhoods from white ones persists up and down the income ladder. A black household with an annual income of $50,000 lives on average in a neighborhood where the median income is under $43,000. But whites with the same income live in neighborhoods where the median income is almost $53,000—about 25 percent higher.

Meanwhile, white families with an annual income of just $13,000 on average live in neighborhoods where the median income is $45,000—slightly higher than the precincts occupied by middle-class blacks and just below that of middle-class Hispanics. The same dynamic holds for households that making $100,000 annually.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...orhoods-than-middle-class-blacks-and-latinos/

 

[entremet]

One of the biggest builders of wealth is homeownership.

Blacks were discriminated from home loans vociferously up until the Civil Rights Act.

Moreover, Blacks and Latinos cluster in cities demographically, where homeownership is much more expensive and prohibitive.

What's weird in places like NYC and SF is that there's a permanent service class--retail workers, restaurant workers, and so on that are mostly minorities, servicing mostly white folks. It's very disturbing. Go to any Whole Foods in NYC and that's what you see.

 

[LionPride]

Shit I coulda told you that

 

[Frozenprince]

But I thought they were the ones with economic anxiety?

Shhhh. Can't let people know the system is broken now that they've said "fuck you got mine" again.

 

[Slayven]

This doesn't fit the narrative

 

[Chie Satonaka]

Good thing those demographics didnt turn out to vote in 2016.

I know, right? Imagine what would have happened if we had a Democrat in office like we did for the last eight years. Man, business was booming for everyone then!

 

[sphagnum]

I foresee a bunch of racists seizing upon that "lack of motivation " stat.

 

[Slayven]

I foresee a bunch of racists seizing upon that "lack of motivation " stat.

Blacks started being lazy after the civil war. Seems like they took offense to the lose of free labor

 

[Zyae]

I know, right? Imagine what would have happened if we had a Democrat in office like we did for the last eight years. Man, business was booming for everyone then!

This isnt fair. Things arent perfect and they probably will never be but wealth and racial inequality can be directly linked to republican policies for decades.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

The statistics have remained consistent for many decades, under a procession of Democratic and Republican Presidencies and governments.

The entire country is designed to hold the black and brown people down, and really who is President doesn't make any difference and it never has. Change has to come from the ground up, because it will never come from the top down.

 

[Dai101]

Time to sharpen the guillotine.

 

[Chie Satonaka]

This isnt fair. Things arent perfect and they probably will never be but wealth and racial inequality can be directly linked to republican policies for decades.

It's totally fair. You said that it's unfortunate that the affected people didn't show up to vote. First, that's not entirely true. While overall voting was down, black folks (and Latinos to a lesser extent) still turned out and voted for the democratic candidate.

Second, you're making it like having a democratic office would make a huge difference in wealth gain for minorities. It has not. Was this time supposed to be the magic bullet? This is how it is in America because this is how it has ALWAYS been in America. Now, it's just going to get worse.

Edit:

The statistics have remained consistent for many decades, under a procession of Democratic and Republican Presidencies and governments.

The entire country is designed to hold the black and brown people down, and really who is President doesn't make any difference and it never has. Change has to come from the ground up, because it will never come from the top down.

See? This person gets it.

 

[BronzeWolf]

You guys keep this shit and you will get a revolution

 

[mr jones]

I know, right? Imagine what would have happened if we had a Democrat in office like we did for the last eight years. Man, business was booming for everyone then!

Thank god we have a Republican administration that will right the wrongs, and is looking out for those down and out Blacks and Latinos.

 

[Mega]

That's depressing. Not humble bragging but Im glad not to have those statistics reflected in my life as a minority, although sadly some of my friends and family are not doing so well.

 

[SolarPowered]

The statistics have remained consistent for many decades, under a procession of Democratic and Republican Presidencies and governments.

The entire country is designed to hold the black and brown people down, and really who is President doesn't make any difference and it never has. Change has to come from the ground up, because it will never come from the top down.

This is how it has always felt to me even if only economically. Not that I'm saying it justifies not voting democrat, though. Scraps are better than nothing at all.

 

[Africanus]

Let's just cut to the part where 53% of white women screwed us over and continue the conversation, instead of blaming demographics that voted overwhelmingly Democrat when faced with voter suppression and actual economic anxiety.

 

[Chie Satonaka]

Let's just cut to the part where 53% of white women screwed us over and continue the conversation, instead of blaming demographics that voted overwhelmingly Democrat when faced with voter suppression and actual economic anxiety.

No, see, we can't do that. We brought it on ourselves by not turning out, or something.

 

[Electric Eye]

I know, right? Imagine what would have happened if we had a Democrat in office like we did for the last eight years. Man, business was booming for everyone then!

Right? and imagine he had a democratic house and senate that would have helped to pass all the jobs bills etc that he proposed as soon as he got into office instead of getting obstructed by yellow dems and then by republicans that would have been something huh?

 

[Frozenprince]

Right? and imagine he had a democratic house and senate that would have helped to pass all the jobs bills etc that he proposed as soon as he got into office instead of getting obstructed by yellow dems and then by republicans that would have been something huh?

Woulda been.

Shame the majority of white men and women disagreed with that and voted against it.

 

[RDreamer]

God that's just sad to look at.

Imagine if one of our two parties would even fucking acknowledge there's a problem that should be solved.

 

[Electric Eye]

Woulda been.

Shame the majority of white men and women disagreed with that and voted against it.

Well I mean he was a bit busy keeping an economic Armageddon from completely taking us over the edge and although you can argue against the bails outs etc that all kinda took a bit of priority but lets continue to imagine that whoever is president doesn't matter.

 

[Chie Satonaka]

Woulda been.

Shame the majority of white men and women disagreed with that and voted against it.

It's almost as if the majority doesn't WANT minorities to come up.

But it couldn't possibly be that, right?

 

[Frozenprince]

God that's just sad to look at.

Imagine if one of our two parties would even fucking acknowledge there's a problem that should be solved.

Let's be real.

The Democratic party this year was the most progressive in terms of race it's ever been in this country and it still danced its way all around this factoid.

 

[Goose_Se7en]

One of the biggest builders of wealth is homeownership.

Blacks were discriminated from home loans vociferously up until the Civil Rights Act.

Moreover, Blacks and Latinos cluster in cities demographically, where homeownership is much more expensive and prohibitive.

What's weird in places like NYC and SF is that there's a permanent service class--retail workers, restaurant workers, and so on that are mostly minorities, servicing mostly white folks. It's very disturbing. Go to any Whole Foods in NYC and that's what you see.

This right here. So much this. As an Afro-Latino in NYC I see this shit all the fucking time and have seen for years.

 

[Dai101]

It's almost as if the majority doesn't WANT minorities to come up.

But it couldn't possibly be that, right?

Nah, it's economic anxiety

 

[Frozenprince]

Well I mean he was a bit busy keeping an economic Armageddon from completely taking us over the edge and although you can argue against the bails outs etc that all kinda took a bit of priority but lets continue to imagine that whoever is president doesn't matter.

Who is president doesn't matter in the macro scale of economics. The state level and representative level is where you begin addressing these inequities.

And the majority of white voters won't even allow it to get past the start line and haven't for almost two centuries now.

 

[Frozenprince]

This right here. So much this. As an Afro-Latino in NYC I see this shit all the fucking time and have seen for years.

This is the primary reason "economic anxiety" pisses me off.

Because it only exists because the privileged class in this country fears and rejects ever having to do this kind of service work to survive like we do.

 

[SolarPowered]

God that's just sad to look at.

Imagine if one of our two parties would even fucking acknowledge there's a problem that should be solved.

Sometimes people like Bernie pop up, but get stuffed back into a box by the centrists. Can't shake the boat too much or you'll upset those prospective moderate republican voters!

 

[RinsFury]

Just so fucking depressing. White supremacy in America is absolutely systemic and oppressive. Jim Crow never went away, it just took on new names like white flight and economic anxiety.

 

[JoeyJungle]

I foresee a bunch of racists seizing upon that "lack of motivation " stat.

On the Media actually had a really good series about poverty in America (http://www.wnyc.org/series/busted-americas-poverty-myths) that focused on pretty much every type of poverty in America (racial, urban, rural,etc). One of the things it touched on was a variation of the classic marshmellow willpower experiment that adds a twist; before asking the question about they marshmellow, they prompt the child with the same experiment using crayons. http://rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=4622

They give the kids a box of shitty crayons, and tell them that if they wait they'll give them an awesome box of crayons. Then, after the wait period, half the kids got the awesome box they were promised, and the others were told "Oops, we don't have any more, just use the shitty box instead."

Then they did the marshmellow experiment.

At the time she was volunteering at a homeless shelter for families in Santa Ana, California. "There were lots of kids staying there with their families. Everyone shared one big area, so keeping personal possessions safe was difficult," she says. "When one child got a toy or treat, there was a real risk of a bigger, faster kid taking it away. I read about these studies and I thought, 'All of these kids would eat the marshmallow right away.' "

But as she observed the children week after week, she began to question the task as a marker of innate ability alone. "If you are used to getting things taken away from you, not waiting is the rational choice. Then it occurred to me that the marshmallow task might be correlated with something else that the child already knows—like having a stable environment."

The saddest part is that these children growing up in these unstable environments are much more prone to recreating that same environment as adults and perpetuating this cycle. It's not a willpower thing, it's acting rationally when you've been shown time and again that putting your trust in future rewards is a suboptimal choice.

 

[Bounceounce]

But I thought they were the ones with economic anxiety?

They are, I'm not sure why this is so hard to comprehend by people on here when they mock "economic anxiety", the white people are deluded/ignorant and have no idea what they're talking about but perception is reality and the perception they have is one that in conjunction with other issues is one that leads to them making the destructive decisions they make that aren't really an option for minorities in America/ingrained in our history.
And "economic anxiety" like in any other point in history is tied to racial politics amongst other things.

 

[RDreamer]

Let's be real.

The Democratic party this year was the most progressive in terms of race it's ever been in this country and it still danced its way all around this factoid.

Oh I know. I've said countless times around here how angry I am that white liberals seem to want to throw minorities under the bus after an election where black citizens are being gunned down in the streets and Hillary barely fucking talked about it and there was nary a peep about that issue throughout. She pandered too much? Get the fuck outta here.

 

[Electric Eye]

This is the primary reason "economic anxiety" pisses me off.

Because it only exists because the privileged class in this country fears and rejects ever having to do this kind of service work to survive like we do.

Which makes their hate for immigrants even more absurd. Do they really believe the average undocumented worker jumped a fence and then took their 6 figure job opportunity from them? Do they believe if every brown person was sent back they would all automatically have high paying jobs the next day? These people are so stupid they have no Idea what it is to be a brown person who has to wake up everyday and work twice or more as hard as a white American to get to the same place and they do it without complaining because its the way the system has been for ever.

 

[Chie Satonaka]

Just so fucking depressing. White supremacy in America is absolutely systemic and oppressive. Jim Crow never went away, it just took on new names like white flight and economic anxiety.

careful friend

this is the kind if smug liberal bully talk that turns people into nazis

 

[electrotonus]

Just so fucking depressing. White supremacy in America is absolutely systemic and oppressive. Jim Crow never went away, it just took on new names like white flight and economic anxiety.

Playing devil's advocate here: If White supremacy was solely responsible for the wealth gap, why are Asians apparently not affected by it as they earn more than Whites on average in the US?

 

[mozfan12]

But....but I'm told I should only worry about the poor white people in the south/midwest and to sympathize with them because their situation was so bad they needed to vote for the orange cunt.

/end sarcasm

As a Latino, these stats just bring up realities that I see everyday, but are only brought to the forefront when they are "white problems" like the opioid epedimic.

 

[Frozenprince]

Playing devil's advocate here: If White supremacy was solely responsible for the wealth gap, why are Asians apparently not affected by it as they earn more than Whites on average in the US?

Combination of things. Many who immigrate do so willingly and with better education and opportunities, many are already in a position of stability, though there is a history of oppression and exploitation, it's never been as prevalent or as wide spread.

Myriad of factors that boil down too, brown people were already here or brought here forcefully and then beaten down since arriving.

 

[sphagnum]

On the Media actually had a really good series about poverty in America (http://www.wnyc.org/series/busted-americas-poverty-myths) that focused on pretty much every type of poverty in America (racial, urban, rural,etc). One of the things it touched on was a variation of the classic marshmellow willpower experiment that adds a twist; before asking the question about they marshmellow, they prompt the child with the same experiment using crayons. http://rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=4622

They give the kids a box of shitty crayons, and tell them that if they wait they'll give them an awesome box of crayons. Then, after the wait period, half the kids got the awesome box they were promised, and the others were told "Oops, we don't have any more, just use the shitty box instead."

Then they did the marshmellow experiment.

The saddest part is that these children growing up in these unstable environments are much more prone to recreating that same environment as adults and perpetuating this cycle. It's not a willpower thing, it's acting rationally when you've been shown time and again that putting your trust in future rewards is a suboptimal choice.

I will have to save this for the future, thanks.

 

[Kill3r7]

One of the biggest builders of wealth is homeownership.

Blacks were discriminated from home loans vociferously up until the Civil Rights Act.

Moreover, Blacks and Latinos cluster in cities demographically, where homeownership is much more expensive and prohibitive.

What's weird in places like NYC and SF is that there's a permanent service class--retail workers, restaurant workers, and so on that are mostly minorities, servicing mostly white folks. It's very disturbing. Go to any Whole Foods in NYC and that's what you see.

Correct.

 

[MWS Natural]

And then there's fucked up stats like this to boot:



https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...orhoods-than-middle-class-blacks-and-latinos/

WHY. Like specifically why. I feel like I've asked this question before.

 

[HaloSon]

You guys keep this shit and you will get a revolution

The revolution has to happen now. No more waiting.

 

[Platinumstorm]

That looks like a home ownership stat, and we're starting to see that problem for white people as well.

Overall, 40% of adults under the age of 35 years of age live at home with their parents.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/percent...h-their-parents-is-40-percent-a-75-year-high/

My 1br apartment in a racially diverse neighborhood, in a university bubble, went from $1205 to $1800+ over two years for people moving in.

Home ownership for starter houses in Denver is around $285,000, and frankly those are downgrades from what many white people, like myself, had growing up.

This is where white people do have legitimate economic well-being concerns. We're not predicted to be as wealthy as our parents, and we're not going to. With the lack of wealth building to afford housing, and huge rent increases in hot areas of the country, it becomes very difficult to create wealth that builds itself for any family; and for any minority or white family who hasn't been able to build generational wealth.

It cost me well over six figures to go to school over the last three years. My undergrad, I went very conservative on to a local school that gave me a full academic ride.

Using the cost of a starter house in Denver, at 285,000, and the guideline of spending 3x your gross income on a house, your household would need to make $95,000 annually and not have any other debt to afford that house. This excludes so many families, and it excludes even more single parent or single person households. Adults who have parents who own households are more insulated from this as they stand to have some form of an inheritance; provided it isn't all destroyed by long-term elder care.

The solution to this problem is actually migration out of urban centers to small cities, or to smaller urban centers, but that's also an irony for Denver and all of Colorado as it puts up with massive migration from California, driving the prices up. There are also cost prohibitions to migrating out of urban centers, and also uncertainty for people, moving into rural areas of the US that don't have all the amenities of urban centers due to corporate profit-margins that prevent better development of smaller towns. I would imagine it would be difficult to move into a community where you might not know if you would be discriminated against as well; although I personally believe people are more accepting of others, and other cultures, once you get to identify people as being people, rather than an unknown.

Not discussed are the poverty rates for American Indians, which are the worst for any race without argument. Reservations do not have the job infrastructure, nor access infrastructure to support an escape from poverty.

Everyone is hurting in some regards right now. President Trump tapped into the white economic voter very successfully. Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump channeled the populist vote on both sides of the party. How President Trump was able to do that with his background is incredible, in my opinion. I also believe that it was one of the major contributors as to why Secretary Clinton lost the election as she conducted a character campaign against Trump, and Sanders beat her on economic policy.

The long term solution to this is corporate accountability including tax accountability, and corporate ethics reform. As long as profit-margins are the dictating factor for the corporate world, our own well-being is at risk. Right now, as a nation, and perhaps more accurately as developed nations, we have misguided ourselves into blaming globalization, and people of all different political values have done this. This has to be the primary driver in the fight for economic justice, and future elections can't have more "forgotten people".

 

[RDreamer]

Sometimes people like Bernie pop up, but get stuffed back into a box by the centrists. Can't shake the boat too much or you'll upset those prospective moderate republican voters!

Except it was the minority voters that didn't really want Bernie.

 

[Dreams-Visions]

....oof.