On Bill Moyers Journal last night, Moyers played a clip of John F. Kennedy. He did it as a way of talking about how far-and how surprisingly we've come to have a black presidential nominee. But I noticed something different. See if you can spot it:
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal.
I never thought we'd see this in my lifetime. When I was growing up in the segregated south the Democratic Party was the bastion of white male supremacy. The inequality of the races was a given, God-ordained and immutable. Women were okay, as long as they kept to their place. And now look what's happened. A black man and a white woman battled each other to the wire for the nomination by a party that turned itself upside down, inside out, and around in my lifetime. Barack Obama was born the year John F. Kennedy took the oath of office as President of the United States.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: I, John Fitzgerald Kennedy do solemnly swear. . .
BILL MOYERS: At his inauguration, I stood in the clear, cold weather and felt a shiver, not from the weather, but from the hint of things to come. Two years later, Obama was a toddler, and I was 27, and there was Kennedy on television proposing a civil rights bill to end the awful discrimination enforced on black people throughout America's history. It was 45 years ago next week - June 11, 1963 - and the President asked, "Are we to say to the world - and much more importantly to each other - that this is the land of the free, except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens, except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettoes, no master race, except with respect to Negroes."
JOHN F. KENNEDY: The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the State in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing a high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day, one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed. . .
BILL MOYERS: Tragically, Kennedy was assassinated as Congress was still battling over his civil rights bill and Lyndon Johnson was thrust into the White House. I went with him and saw Johnson take up the cause. Martin Luther King marched, and Lyndon Johnson maneuvered, and on the 2nd of July in 1964 the President signed the Civil Rights Act into law. The fight wasn't over; he knew it. The President told me, "I think we've just handed the South to the Republican Party for the rest of my life - and yours." Sure enough, the backlash was so bitter, and the Republican Party, once the party of Lincoln, so exploited it, that I figured this country would have a serious woman candidate for President long before any person of African descent. As the choice came down this year to one or the other, is one of those shifts that democracy and history take when we least suspect it.
BARACK OBAMA: Because of you, tonight I can stand before you and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the State in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing a high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day, one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed. . .
Now, high school graduation rates are a subject of some controversy But no one doubts that a substantial racial graduation rate persists to this day. College statistics are much more solid, but again, no one doubts that there are still substantial gaps. Kennedy's figures for "professional men" seem quite high for the time. It was still quite commonplace in the early 1960s for black college graduates to hold menial jobs. A college degree did not mean a college degree job, and the same was true for professionals as well.
These figures that Kennedy threw out were troubling to me, but it would take some time to dig out the relevant figures, and assure myself that they were not in dispute. But unemployment?
Well, as it happens, the US Government didn't actually keep employment figures by race at the time that Kennedy gave that address. But the figure of twice the unemployment rate was quite believable. And since that time, the unemployment rate by race has been quite well documented. In fact, I wrote about right here at Open Left not too long ago, in a diary called, "Two Long Recessions". The first recession was in quality of life generally, as measured using by indices such as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI). Here's part of what I wrote at the beginning of my discussion of the second long recession:
Black America's Perpetual Recession
Obviously, Black America suffers disproportionately from the long depression described above. Income inequality--one of the factors measured by GPI--affects Black America disproportionately. Negative externalities--such as exposure to pollution--also impact Black America much more severely than they affect America as a whole. But Black America also suffers a perpetual depression in conventional economic terms as well.
The Institute for Southern Studies was founded in 1970 by veterans of the civil rights movement, and has published its journal, Southern Exposure since 1973. It also has a blog, where Executive Director Chris Kromm recently wrote:
Black America is in a permanent recession
Pundits are working themselves into a dither about whether the U.S. is or isn't officially "in a recession." But for at least one segment of the country, the question is settled: African-Americans are deep in recession, and have been for a while.
In fact, black America is in what should be called a permanent recession.
In January, economist Algernon Austin at the Economic Policy Institute pointed out that even in good times, huge numbers of African-Americans are being left behind:
In the best of times, many African American communities are forced to tolerate levels of unemployment unseen in most white communities. The 2001 recession pushed the white annual unemployment rate up from a low of 3.5% in 2000 to a high of 5.2% in 2003. During the same period, the black unemployment rate shot up from 7.6% to 10.8%.
In the "one picture/one thousand words" department:
As we see, the black unemployment rate is routinely significantly higher than white unemployment rate--so much higher, in fact, that black unemployment at its lowest only briefly dipped below the highest levels for white unemployment since record-keeping began. White unemployment rose above 7.5% in the early 1980s, considered a period of wrenching hard times. But black unemployment only dipped below these record levels for a few years during Clinton's second term--a period of broad economic expansion that blacks remember fondly as a period of economic opportunity! Indeed, this experience is one of the chief reasons that Hillary Clinton initially mantained such broad black support against Barack Obama, until his victory in Iowa caucuses among white voters.
Looking at the chart above, it looks to the naked eye as if the white and black unemployment rates go up and down together, but that the black rate is roughly twice that of the white rate, and indeed, if we graph the difference between the two rates, we see that this is generally so, as the difference between the rates closely tracks the black rate itself:
What this tells us is quite significant--generally speaking there are twice as many blacks as whites, percentagewise, looking for work, regardless of how tight the labor market is.
If one black worker in six is looking for work, then one white worker in twelve will be looking, too. If things improve, and one black worker in twelve is looking for work, then one white worker in twenty-four will be looking for work. If things improve even more, and one black worker in twenty-four is looking for work... well, that's never happened. The economy has never been that good.
In this one respect, clearly, nothing has changed for black America since Kennedy gave his speech--a speech that was in itself historic... and yet has left so much still to be done.
Black America's endless recession will not end, just because Barack Obama gets elected President. Make no mistake about it, Obama's election will be an historic event. No one can doubt it. But it will not magically change everything in the twinkling of an eye.
Black America's endess recession is just one statistic that's indicative of the "two Americas" that John Edwards spoke of. The "two Americas" divide is not solely racial, but those on the wealthy side are overwhelmingly white, and those who are not, are not. And so we should be very clear about this-in electing Barack Obama, rather than John Edwards, we are taking the cheap and easy way out.
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