When Will We Play the Race Card?

America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay.

MLK – Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

The question about African Americans’ “empowerment” is not as much about our political clout as it is whether or not we are better off economically than we were when Martin Luther King was killed in 1968.

Some black Americans are doing very well. Barack Obama’s presidential run, Tiger Woods is the world’s best-paid athlete and former Merrill Lynch CEO Stanley O’Neal pocketed $160 million in a golden corporate parachute. But these blacks are the exception rather than the rule. Where MLK’s civil rights activities paid off the most was in spawning a Black Middle Class. Since the Civil Rights Movement, the black political and middle-income class has grown significantly. Forty years since MLK declared American owed a debt to Black Americans, Barack Obama is black’s race-neutral Messiah, and our middle class group is regressing.

With their contemporary image of surfeit, the question surrounding the Black Middle Class Era is “What contribution have they made toward Martin’s ‘dream of economic equity’ in America?” The black middle class grew from the Civil Rights Movement through public policy and increased opportunities for skills development. Since King died the black middle class population has quadrupled. In 2008, over a million black households have annual incomes of $100,000 a year or more. These upward strides and their excesses have given the illusion that race cannot be the barrier that some make it out to be.

The rates of self-obsession and consumption among the generations of black middle class illustrate how static hold reaps regression. Many of the black middle class are now caught up in the financial meltdown. Despite their displays of opulence, similar salaries and educational backgrounds, the majority of the black middle class never enjoyed class-equivalency to whites

The “black middle class” is predominately a development that arose after the 1960s. Prior to then, African Americans had limited opportunities. In 1960, blacks had little to no access to higher education and only three percent graduated from college. Those blacks who were professionals were mainly confined to serving the African American population. The Black Middle Class MLK had envisioned was to grow and impact traditional black communities.

While a black underclass has remained rooted in urban poverty, blacks of middle class means started to leave them in the 1970s to pursue quality schools, security and appreciated property values in suburban neighborhoods. Nowadays, many blacks are finding their grip on middle class is precarious. The value of many Black middle-class homeowners wealth is falling. Loans that many of them received in the 1990s were high-cost sub prime loans. Now, the value of their homes is sinking as foreclosures occur and their banks have frozen home equity lines of credit. Their “trappings of power” are being foreclosed and America’s contemporary black middle class is being revealed as having been more “symbol” than “substance”. In what Booker T. would have called “frivolous actions,” the black middle class’ activities have tilted more toward trappings of consumption than economic advancement for the race.

The Black Middle Class cashed in on the check MLK said America owed. As they became “middle-class” they became adherents of the status quo. Many among the Black Middle Class never think, or act, outside a mainstream mindset. They became establishment-oriented and provided “insufficient funds” toward lifting up their fellow Black Americans.

“If they have no bread, let them eat cake,” is how the black middle class has responded to their urban and underclass cousins. To their determent, middle class blacks have been obsessed with “mainstreaming”. Their unflinching support of the Obama candidacy and acceptance of the American establishment’s indifference to the plight of poor blacks and social policy needed to maintain affirmative action, end law enforcement and judicial injustices, and increase race-targeted antipoverty programs to help poor blacks illustrates their abandonment of any legacy of King’s economic dream. As they reel backwards, wonder how many of the black middle class recognize the error of their deeds? By

William Reed, Week of October 26, 2008

Tags: National

Category: Business Exchange