Thora Institute

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
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[Will White Rap Fans Help or Hurt Black America?]
________________________________________________________________________

[This piece originally appeared in the Daily Voice.]

Nothing succeeds like stereotypes. Anti-black stereotypes are especially powerful. Take, for example, the now popular claim that black students don't value education. This claim has been repeated over and over again in spite of the fact that there is a mountain of evidence against it.

In 1986, in an Urban Review article, two scholars studying a Washington D.C. high school claimed that black students did not achieve academically because of a fear of being perceived as "acting white." People pounced so quickly on this idea that they failed to realize that the researchers did not actually present any black students who said they were afraid of being called "white."

Of the eight students discussed in the article, four indicated that they were worried about being called "brainiacs." The other four raised other issues. A fear of "acting white" was the researchers' highly debatable interpretation of what was going on, but it was not a direct quotation.

Many white students have been called "brainiac," "nerd," "geek," and similar names by other white students. It is unfortunate that students tease and bully each other. But this is not "a black thing." The real question therefore is whether academically-oriented teasing is more common among black students than among whites. There is no convincing evidence that this is the case. A 2003 study by the Girl Scout Research Institute, for example, found equal levels of concern about school-related teasing among black and white girls.

What about pro-school attitudes? Contrary to the popular stereotype, much of the evidence suggests that black students value education more than whites. The same year the Urban Review article was published, the Monitoring the Future survey found that 74 percent of black high school seniors believed that getting good grades was of "great" or "very great importance," but only 41 percent of white seniors felt as strongly. Half of black seniors reported that knowing a lot about intellectual matters was of "great" or "very great importance," but only one-fifth of white seniors felt the same.

Other and more recent surveys have had similar results. A 2006 survey by Public Agenda found that black students were more likely than white students to believe that "increasing math and science education would improve high school." The Higher Education Research Institute's 2006 survey of college freshmen found that the majority-black students at historically black colleges were more likely to aspire to obtain a Ph.D. than college freshmen generally.

Different organizations asking different questions of different black students at different times have all come to the same conclusion: black students value education. Despite the fact that these surveys are based on interviews of hundreds of black students from nationally-representative samples, none of them has been deemed as newsworthy as that study with four students worried about being called "brainiacs."

I can imagine some critics arguing that it doesn't matter what black students say, what matters is what they do. They might point out that black students have lower levels of academic achievement than white students. This is true, but it is only a part of the achievement story. One has to look at the trends in academic achievement, not just the one-time snapshots.

Since the 1970s, the best standardized tests have shown a greater increase in black students' scores than in white students' scores. The long-term trend National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) math test for eight graders, for example, shows a 14 point gain for white students but a 34 point gain for black students. There remains a large gap in scores on this test, but it was 20 points larger in the 1970s.

There are similar results for the long-term trend NAEP reading test, for the National Assessment of Adult Literacy test, the General Social Survey vocabulary test and other standardized exams. If black students are rejecting education left and right, why are their test scores increasing?

What the current academic research shows is that much of the black-white achievement gap exists prior to first-grade, many years before academic teasing begins. This gap is due to broad social and economic disadvantages among black families in comparison to white families. The gap grows during school years because these disadvantaged black students then attend schools of lower quality than white students.

Adults concerned about raising black student achievement have two options: we can get back into the civil rights business of confronting the social and economic inequalities that produce the achievement gap or we can cling to convenient stereotypes and keep on blaming black students. Blaming black students certainly means less work for us.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com

[Will White Rap Fans Help or Hurt Black America?]
________________________________________________________________________


Race is fundamentally a sociological phenomenon. For some, recent developments in genetics produce confusion on this matter because it seems that scientists are uncovering the biology of race. But actually the opposite is occurring.

For example,a new discovery suggests that maybe 40 percent of blacks have a natural beta blocker that helps them recover from heart failure. Only two percent of whites appear to have this trait. This is a large and significant racial disparity. Blacks are twenty times more likely than whites to have the beta-blocker characteristic.

Some people take findings of this sort and assume that it shows that race is biological. But this is not the case. Let’s say we simply followed the biology and made a “beta-blocker race” and a “non-beta-blocker race.” Neither of these races map onto the racial categories for blacks or whites. Sixty percent of blacks and 98 percent of whites are of the same “race”—“non-beta-blockers.” We don’t know what the breakdown is for Asians or other racial categories that people have defined. Presumably, these groups would only complicate matters further because some portion of them would likely also fall into the “non-beta-blocker race.”

In recent years, scientists have found many genetic correlates to our sociological racial categories. Most of these correlates have been in what can be called the “junk DNA” in our genetic code and, unlike the beta blocker characteristic, have no apparent usefulness to our wellbeing. With many of these correlates in their toolboxes and some understanding of mathematical probabilities, scientists can use biology to predict a person’s actual race or racial ancestry from their DNA.

This process is akin to someone using a person’s consumption patterns to predict their political affiliation. If you know that 60 percent of people who buy car A vote Democratic. And 55 percent of people who listen to music B vote Democratic. And 68 percent of people who drink beer C vote Democratic. And 75 percent of people who shop at store D vote Democratic. If someone does all four of the above things—A, B, C and D—that Democrats are more likely to do than Republicans, then it is highly likely that they are a Democrat.

Geneticists have found hundreds of bits of the genetic code that are somewhat more likely to be in one racial group than another. They use these hundreds of snippets to calculate the likelihood that someone belongs to a particular racial group. Since these analyses rely on probabilities, the confidence of the prediction depends on the specific methodology and the characteristics of the group. The last time I looked into this matter, scientists found American Indian membership very difficult to predict. Scientists, however, have been constantly working to improve their methodology.

Now to do these predictions, scientists have to start with the racial category and then find the DNA that correlate. They did not simply look at the DNA and then racial categories appeared to them. Going back to the predicting Democrats example, you have to start off knowing who is a Democrat. Only then can you identify which consumption items are important to look at. Similarly, you have to start with racial categories to find the DNA bits that a useful. It cannot be done just using biology. The social category comes first and then scientists try to rig up a system of biology and mathematics to best approximate the social categories.

Using a process similar to this one, geneticists can now identify if someone is black or white. They can even go further and identify if someone’s ancestry is from a specific part of the world, like West Africa as opposed to some other part of sub-Saharan Africa. They also can make fairly accurate assessments of what share of one’s ancestry came from West Africa and what share came from Western Europe. Although scientists are piecing together large numbers of genetic clues to predict a person’s race and ancestry, this assemblage of genetic snippets is not race.

These techniques were only recently discovered. They are probably less than 20 years old, yet race is more than 300 hundred years old. People in the eighteenth century knew the concept of race, but they would be completely dumbfounded by the genetic work scientists are doing today. A person from the eighteenth century and a twenty-first century geneticist could easily talk about race, but they could not immediately talk about genetics.

That scientists can find genetic correlates to racial categories after the fact, should not blind us to the fact that it was not the genes that constructed the categories in the first place. It was people’s social definitions. In the U.S. the one-drop rule in particular highlighted the fact that even physical appearance could be of secondary importance. The U.S. Postal Service reminds us of this with a Black Heritage stamp of Charles Chesnutt. It was not biology that made Chesnutt black.



[Read more about the social construction of race in Achieving Blackness.]

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
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[The Thora Institute needs you.]

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com

[Will White Rap Fans Help or Hurt Black America?]
________________________________________________________________________


By a variety of measures, the American middle class is economically stressed and insecure. How insecure is today’s black middle class specifically? Dëmos finds a third of the black middle class at risk of falling out of the middle class. The Pew Research Center finds roughly similar levels of economic insecurity among the black middle class.

“Middle class” is actually a squishy concept. There are many ways that people define middle class. For example, the Black Directions report on the black middle class compares seven different ways of defining the middle-class-ness. Who is in the middle class and how large it is depends on how one defines it.

The Pew Research Center simply asked respondents to declare whether or not they were middle class. When one does this half of black adults say that they are middle class. This seems like a high percentage when one considers that about half of white adults also declare themselves to be middle class.

Isn’t the white middle class larger than the black middle class?

The key issue again is how one defines middle class. If one looks at the median family income of blacks and whites who say that they are middle class, the black median is nearly $10,000 less than the white median. By a subjective measure, the Pew data indicates that the black middle class is the same size as the white middle class. An objective, income-based definition of “middle class” could yield a black “middle class” that is smaller than the white “middle class.” Eight percent more whites than blacks say they are upper class however, and ten percent more blacks than whites say that they are lower class.

Source: The Pew Research Center.

From 24 to 40 percent of middle-class blacks are economically insecure depending on the measure. In the Pew survey, 24 percent of middle-class blacks struggle to meet expenses. Twenty-four percent are also afraid that they may face wage cuts or lose benefits in the coming year. Thirty percent are worried that they might lose their job. Forty percent experienced two or more financial difficulties in the past year (i.e., they could not pay bills, could not save or had to cut spending).

Dëmos has assessed the financial security of the black middle class using objective measures. They examined households making two to six times the poverty level (roughly $40,000 to $120,000 for a family of four). The head of the households had to be between 25 to 64 years old and not have more than $500,000 in assets.

Dëmos also defined specific criteria for being “financially secure,” “financially at-risk” and in-between. This “middle class security index” has specific asset levels, educational achievement, housing expenses, living expenses, and health insurance coverage to place households in one of the three categories. According to the Dëmos’ index, a third of the black middle class are at high risk for slipping out of the middle class.

It is now clear that the project of black socioeconomic advancement has at least three parts: (1) poverty reduction, (2) upward mobility and (3) securing the black middle class. The assumption had been that while the black middle class did not have as high incomes and were not as wealthy as the white middle class, they had nonetheless “made it.” New research suggests that for too many in the black middle class being middle class is merely a stop on the way to poverty.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
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Note: White poverty estimates prior to 1980 include Hispanics. Data from 1980 to 2000 is of non-Hispanic whites. The 2006 estimate is of the "white alone, not Hispanic" population. Black poverty estimates include Hispanics. The 2006 black estimate is of the "black alone" population.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau.


Many people have been talking about black poverty, but few show that they have actually examined the poverty trends. The figure above shows the decade-by-decade change in poverty for blacks and for whites. Between 1959 and 1969, the black poverty rate declined by a tremendous 22.9 percentage points. The following decades showed relatively small declines until the 1990s. From 1990-1999, the black poverty rate declined by 8.3 percentage points. Since 2000, black poverty has increased slightly. Anyone really serious about reducing black poverty would try to understand these changes. Of particular interest should be the 1960s and the 1990s declines.

In recent years, Bill Cosby, John McWhorter, Juan Williams and others have argued that since the 1960s bad values have caused an increase in black poverty. The truth of the matter is that aside from some fluctuations, there has been no sustained increase in black poverty. In the 1990s, quite contrary to the popular claims, black America saw a sizable reduction in black poverty.

Further, it is clear that there are large economic forces affecting both black and white poverty rates. When black poverty declines, white poverty declines. When black poverty increases; white poverty increases. Any theory of black poverty has to explain why black and white poverty move in parallel. A theory of cultural problems that are unique to blacks does not explain the parallel trends for whites.

Most of the current crop of black public intellectuals have not examined the economic data with any care. They do not seem to understand that economic conditions and labor market practices affect black economic outcomes. It should not be a radical idea that economic factors have an important role to play in black poverty rates. The reason why black and white poverty rates move in parallel is because both blacks and whites are affected by the overall U.S. economy in similar ways. (There are differences for populations with large numbers of recent immigrants.)

Two black economists, Steven Pitts and William Spriggs, have issued a report, Beyond the Mountiantop: King’s Prescription for Poverty situating the discussion of black poverty in the dynamics of the America economy. The report pulls Martin Luther King Jr. into contemporary debates by presenting King’s views on the causes of poverty.

King does not side with the current generation of black public intellectuals. In 1967, King stated:

At that time [of the early 20th century] economic status was considered the measure of the individual’s abilities and talents. And in the thinking of that day, the absence of worldly goods indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber. We’ve come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind then in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. The poor are less often dismissed, I hope, from our conscience today by being branded as inferior and incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands, it does not eliminate all poverty.

King understood black poverty, therefore, as a two-part problem: (1) a general failure of the economic system to distribute wealth, which would affect blacks and whites, and (2) the result of anti-black discrimination in the labor market. King explicitly rejects the culture-of-poverty-type ideas that are popular today, and sees those type of ideas as an out-of-date way of thinking not based on a good understanding of the economy.

Given these causes of black poverty, Pitts and Spriggs identify four policy goals:

• generate full employment—everyone who wants a job should have one
• fight discrimination
• protect worker’s freedom and right to join a union
• raise the minimum wage
.

Pitts and Spriggs point out that the reason there was a tremendous decline in black poverty over the 1960s was because all four of these goals were in place. The economy was at full employment. The U.S. government was still earnest about enforcing anti-discrimination policies. Unions were strong and growing. And the real value of the minimum wage was high.

During the 1970s and 1980s all of these policy goals were in decline or largely absent. During the 1990s, only one of the four policy items was really in place. The economy achieved full employment at the national level. But there was lax enforcement and weak support for anti-discrimination policy. Unionization rates were declining. And the real value of the federal minimum wage in 2006 was $2.33 less than it was in 1969. One is better than none, but it is clear that four is better than one.

In an era when so many people “get it wrong” about poverty in black America, it is refreshing to see some folks who get it right.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
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D.C. Event

Policy Prescriptions for Growing Income Inequality in the United States

by Algernon Austin

A Presentation for the Labor and Employment Relations Association, Washington, D.C. Chapter

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Woman's National Democratic Club, 1526 New Hampshire Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20036

Please contact Lorenzo Di Silvio or by phone at (202) 822-2127 x119 to make a reservation for this meeting. Please make your reservation no later than 5:00 p.m. on Monday, April 21. Reservations are on a “first-come, first-served” basis, so please reserve your place promptly as space is limited. An e-mail response is preferred. Sign-in 11:45, luncheon 12:15, program 12:45. $20 for members with reservations, $10 for student members, $25 for non-members and members without reservations.
________________________________________________________________________


“Most Americans feel stuck in their tracks,” reports the Pew Research Center. “A majority of adults in this country say that in the past five years they either haven’t moved ahead in life or have fallen backwards. This is the most downbeat assessment of personal progress in nearly a half century of polling by the Pew Research Center and the Gallup Organization.”

This conclusion is based on the new Pew Inside the Middle Class survey that hones in on the views of the American middle class, although people from all class backgrounds were surveyed. Last year, the Pew Research Center released a report showing increased pessimism among blacks. That survey covered many different issues from the new one, so the two surveys are not completely comparable. However, there are some similar questions. The new Pew middle-class study suggests that at least part of the reason for increased pessimism among blacks is due to the fact that Americans generally are more pessimistic about the state of the country.

The average American household earned less in 2006 (the most recent year for Census data) than in 1999 and is in more debt. The American middle class feels that it has to strain more to maintain a middle-class lifestyle and middle-class adults are desperate for more free time. All of these factors lead Americans generally to be more pessimistic.

In some ways blacks seem more pessimistic than whites. This year 40 percent of all Americans said that their lives are better now than five years ago. Last year, only 20 percent of blacks said that blacks are better off now than five years ago. It is important to note that these are different questions. One asks for individuals to assess their own lives another asks for individuals to assess a group. It is also worth noting that both percentages have declined recently. From 2002 to 2008, the percent of Americans saying that their lives are better today declined by 8 percentage points. From 1999 to 2007, 12 percent fewer blacks stated that blacks are better off. It is quite possible that some blacks are saying that blacks are doing worse because they are actually doing worse personally.

In 1986, 57 percent of blacks surveyed stated that they believed that things would be better in the future for blacks. In 2007, the percentage had declined to 44 percent. Was this decline due to a perceived cultural crisis or to the economic downturn? Or both? The new middle-class survey suggests the downturn might be playing a significant role. The black response to the future of blacks matches the national response to the future of America’s children to a surprising degree. See the figure below. (Click on the image for a better view.) This might just be a coincidence, but it seems likely that people who are experiencing economic hardship would be pessimistic about things generally.

Source: Pew Research Center, Inside the Middle Class, p. 42 and Optimism about Black Progress Declines, p. 1.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

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[This piece was originally published in
the Daily Voice.com.]

How the country responds or does not respond to the housing crisis could add to the long list of racial grievances. As Senator Barack Obama so effectively argued, race can play a big part in our perception of the world. My sense is that, to a degree, whites and blacks have very different readings of what happened to produce the housing crisis.

Of course, there is a diversity of views among whites and blacks, but in talking with people and reading articles, op-eds and reports, I've noticed certain tendencies. My evidence is anecdotal, so I could be wrong, but I would wager that in this issue, as in so many others, race matters.

The whites I've encountered have tended to be more sympathetic to the tough-love approach espoused by Senator John McCain. They have talked about people who irresponsibly sought to purchase more house than they could afford. Or people who thought their home values would rise forever and used their homes like a machine that printed money. In these narratives, people who are facing foreclosure do not deserve much sympathy. They made their bed and they should lie in it.

The blacks that I've heard from bring a very different perspective to the issue. They think of the history of racial discrimination by the Federal Housing Authority. They also think of the recent findings of racial discrimination in lending from paired-tester studies. When these blacks hear of the disproportionate negative impact of the subprime crisis on people of color, their first suspicion is that once again racial discrimination was at play.

Were borrowers facing foreclosure greedy and irresponsible, or were they exploited by racially-biased predatory lenders looking to bundle and sell loans?

It is very difficult to determine to what extent either of these positions is true. But it is very important that we do find out. If we were to bail out large numbers of greedy and irresponsible borrowers, that would be a bad. On the other hand, if we were to ignore the plight of large numbers of blacks who were taken advantage of by lenders, that would also be bad.

It is good to be aware that people have different perspectives on issues. These perspectives should be heard and understood. But, as difficult a time as the country has had in just acknowledging different perspectives, that acknowledgement is still the easy part of the problem.

The hard part is determining which perspective is right and getting everyone, or at least a majority of both sides, to agree on what is the right answer. Only when there is agreement on the right answer can a policy response be crafted that is seen as fair and appropriate by all and racial conflict avoided.

In the housing meltdown, it is quite possible that both positions are correct. It is possible that some people greedily pursued houses they could not afford. It is also possible that minority borrowers were exploited by lenders.

If we are going to bail out institutions involved in the crisis, the federal government should require that we learn exactly what went wrong. If lenders open their records to researchers at the Federal Reserve or the General Accounting Office, we can learn more about the people who borrowed and the homes they acquired. Were the homes extravagant or were the interest terms exorbitant and the deals shady?

It is clear that blacks were more likely to have subprime mortgages, but as lenders are quick to point out, this fact does not prove discrimination. Blacks tend to have more debt, lower incomes and much less wealth than whites, so it could be that blacks' generally worse credit scores placed them disproportionately in the subprime market. If the federal government commissioned a study with individual credit score data--used confidentially, of course--we could obtain very strong evidence on whether it was race or credit scores that placed so many blacks in the subprime market.

Armed with the findings of this research and with sensitivities to the long history of racial discrimination by financial institutions, the country could then move toward a sensible path to prevent us from ending up in this place again.

Recognizing that blacks and whites may come at issues like the housing crisis from different perspectives is an important insight. These perspectives need to be acknowledged and respected. But we can't end there. We need to figure out how we can get blacks and whites--and everybody else--to agree on a common vision of how we should move forward. That is the hard part.

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com

[On the Need for Comprehensive Criminal Justice Reform.]
________________________________________________________________________


Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently made quite candid remarks that race still matters today. Below are quotes taken from the Washington Times article.

Condi Quotes

“descendants of slaves did not get much of a head start, and I think you continue to see some of the effects of that. That particular birth defect [during the founding of the United States] makes it hard for us to confront it, hard for us to talk about it, and hard for us to realize that it has continuing relevance for who we are today.”

“[Race is] a paradox and contradiction in this country, [which] we still haven't resolved.”

“[Race] continues to have effects [on public discussions and] the deepest thoughts that people hold.”

“America doesn't have an easy time dealing with race. [Members of my family have] endured terrible humiliations.”

“What I would like understood as a black American is that black Americans loved and had faith in this country even when this country didn't love and have faith in them — and that's our legacy.”

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
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[The Thora Institute needs you.]

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com

[On the Need for Comprehensive Criminal Justice Reform.]
________________________________________________________________________


I recently came across yet another call for black entrepreneurship as a means to black economic development. I think this is a big mistake. I see this idea on par with recommending that people buy lottery tickets to achieve wealth.

Now, I do think that having a successful business is a supreme way to build wealth and income. I also believe that there should be more successful black businesses.

So, why am I not big on entrepreneurship?

The simple reason is that most businesses fail. There is a high reward to having a successful business because it is a high-risk venture. If it were easy to have a successful business everyone would have done it already.

Some people have a brilliant idea and those people should start a business. Some people have a great passion to own their own business and they should probably do it. Some have the wealth so that if they lose their investment they can easily continue with their lives. These folks can do it if they have sufficient interest. But even when you tally up the numbers of people in these three categories, you still end up with a small minority.

There are many pitfalls in the way of business success. According to Patricia Schaefer, starting a business just to make money is one of the top wrong reasons to start a businesses. Schaefer sees the singular-focus on getting rich as one of the leading reasons businesses fail.

Starting a business is like becoming a professional athlete or a skilled musician. It’s not for everybody. Some people—a small number—have what is necessary and most people don’t.

A better solution for most people is to find the best job they can, save and invest wisely. People should also support government policies that lead to a broadly shared prosperity. There are investments that the government can make to improve people’s job and educational opportunities. There are investments that would make America a stronger country economically. These policies are as important as any personal action one can take.

There is somewhat of a compromise position. Michael E. Gerber, author of The E-Myth Revisited, points to franchising as an easier path to business success. How does a small-businessperson compete with gigantic businesses like McDonalds, Toyota and Starbucks? She doesn’t have to. She can open a McDonalds or a Toyota dealership or a Starbucks. Now, this path is not easy either, but it can be easier than starting from scratch.

Entrepreneurship for the right people is a great idea. For the wrong people, it can lead to disaster. In many ways homeownership is different from entrepreneurship. Homeownership, for one, is a policy for a wide range of people; entrepreneurship is not. But even a wise general policy like homeownership, when engaged under the wrong terms, can lead to disaster. See what the subprime housing crisis is costing black America. If we can’t tell every black person to go out and purchase a home, we have to realize that we also cannot tell the masses of black people to go out and start a business.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
[The Thora Institute needs you.]

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com

[On the Need for Comprehensive Criminal Justice Reform.]
________________________________________________________________________


Have you ever missed an appointment? Maybe you forgot; maybe you overslept; maybe you were stuck in traffic; maybe there was an emergency of some sort? Well, if you were on parole, missing an appointment with a parole officer could lead you back to prison.

Does this make sense?

Should people be incarcerated for the “crime” of missing an appointment? Should we be paying $25,000 or more a year in prison costs on people who missed appointments? Should we be building new prisons to accommodate inmates who missed appointments? Is this a wise use of our tax dollars?

My presentation here is likely too simplistic, but it does point to a real issue in our dysfunctional criminal justice system. Many people released from prison are re-incarcerated for technical violations which include missing an appointment.

One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008, a report from the Pew Center on the States, observes:

While some violators are re-incarcerated for new crimes, a significant number wind up back in prison for so-called “technical” violations—transgressions such as a failed drug test or missed appointment with a supervisory agent. California locks up massive numbers of violators, scrambling to accommodate them in a sprawling, 171,444-inmate system so crowded that a three-judge panel may order a population reduction. A 2005 study showed that more than two-thirds of parolees in the Golden State were returned to prison within three years of release; of those, 39 percent were due to technical violations. (p. 18)

There are alternatives to re-incarceration for technical violations.

These include a mix of day reporting centers, electronic monitoring systems, and community service. This strategy makes offenders pay for their missteps but keeps prison beds free for more violent and chronic lawbreakers. And, it makes it more likely the violators will be able to pay victim restitution, child support and taxes. (p. 19)

These alternatives are more proportionate to the offense, and they are a lot less costly to society as a whole and to the ex-offender. Most states, however, do not take this sensible route, but instead rely on re-incarceration.

Much of the attention One in 100 received focused on America’s incredibly high incarceration rate. But the report also contained several “smart on crime” recommendations for making our criminal justice system more effective, less expensive and more humane. The report advocated the use of what I’m calling “smart sentencing,” “smart parole and probation,” and “smart release” policies.

“Smart” Sentencing and Diversion Policies

• Drug courts that break the cycle of crime and addiction with frequent drug tests, a continuum of treatment services and increasing penalties for violations.


• Targeted penalty changes that steer selected low-risk offenders to community corrections programs or modify mandatory minimums.


• Comprehensive sentencing guidelines that allow states to decide as a matter of policy which types of offenders should go to prison and which are appropriate for community corrections.

“Smart” Parole and Probation Policies

• Intermediate sanctions such as day reporting centers for offenders who break the rules of their release, to ensure that each violation receives a swift, certain and proportionate response.


• Short-term residential facilities for persistent rule violators with substance abuse problems.


• Performance incentives that shorten terms of supervision for offenders who comply with their conditions and fulfill obligations such as victim restitution and child support.

“Smart” Release Policies

• Risk reduction credits that allow slightly earlier release for inmates who complete treatment and education programs designed to reduce recidivism.


• Risk-based release instruments that use analysis of actual recidivism patterns to help releasing authorities decide who should remain behind bars and who is ready for release.


• Sufficient program availability in prisons and the community so release isn’t delayed because inmates cannot complete requirements.
(p. 20)

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
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[The Thora Institute needs you.]

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
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[On the Need for Comprehensive Criminal Justice Reform.]
________________________________________________________________________


Washington Post columnist, Richard Cohen should be commended for his concern about the high incarceration rate of black men. But his understanding and diagnosis of the problem is off base. He repeats the mantras of the leading black public intellectuals and claims that “a kind of cultural malignancy has taken root in parts of the African American underclass.”

Let’s look at the actual violent crime data by race from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.


What one sees here is that violent crime in black America is way down from where it was in the 1970s and 1980s. If one were to presume a simple and direct relationship between bad cultural values and crime—I don’t, but the pundits do—then one should be arguing that black America has much better cultural values today than in past decades. Also, one should note that the black violent crime rate is lower now than the white violent crime rate was in the 1970s. Did anyone declare that a “cultural malignancy” had taken root in white America during the 1970s? For anyone bothering to look at the data, there is no basis on which to claim that a “cultural malignancy has taken root” in black America.

Where people routinely “get it wrong” is by presuming that the incarceration rate is a simple reflection of the crime rate—it isn’t. America’s so-called tough on crime policies and war on drugs have dramatically increased the incarceration rate. We saw above that there has been no huge upward trend in violent crime since the 1970s. Below we can see the overall violent crime and property crime trends. Both show declines since the 1970s.



Now, look at the incarceration rate trend below.


It just keeps going up. So, although the crime rate for black males has decreased, the incarceration rate keeps increasing. If there is a “cultural malignancy” in American society it is our criminal justice system which has an insatiable appetite for black bodies. When, when, when will our so-called leaders bother to actually look at the data and speak out about this? When!?!


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
[The Thora Institute needs you.]

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
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[On the Need for Comprehensive Criminal Justice Reform.]
________________________________________________________________________


When Martin Luther King Jr. died, he did not think that the civil rights struggle was over. He and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was about to embark on a new, major phase of activism called the Poor People’s Campaign. During this time of year when we celebrate King’s birthday and think about black history, no one talks about the Poor People’s Campaign; but we should.

People forget the Poor People’s Campaign for a good reason. If King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was the highpoint of the civil rights movement, the Poor People’s Campaign was the low. The consensus is that the Campaign was largely a failure.

While there were many factors behind the Poor People’s Campaign’s lack of success, an important one was that the Campaign was simply way ahead of its time. The Campaign was based on the insight by SCLC that blacks could not be full, equal participants in American society while burdened by high rates of poverty. SCLC when further and argued that no Americans—of any race—could realize their full potential while living in poverty. The Campaign was committed to all poor people and to multiculturalism decades before “multiculturalism” entered the popular lexicon.

Poor whites involved in the Campaign issued demands for “adequate medical and dental care for all Americans.” Forty years later, our elected officials are finally realizing that this is a good and feasible idea. We haven’t realized these demands yet, but at least we are talking about it seriously.

The number one goal of the Poor People’s Campaign was full employment. In a full-employment economy everyone who wants a job has one. For anyone concerned about reducing black poverty, full employment is a silver bullet. From 1959 to 1970, the black poverty rate declined from 55 percent to 33 percent. Over the 1970s and 1980s, there were no sustained reductions in black poverty. Between 1990 and 2000, the black poverty rate declined from 32 percent to 23 percent.

Why did we see big declines in black poverty over the 1960s and 1990s, but not over the 1970s and 1980s? The answer is full employment. When the nation is at full employment many poor blacks are able to find jobs and obtain wages that allow them to lift themselves out of poverty. Employers who might usually prefer not to hire blacks are so in need of workers that they put aside their prejudices to keep their businesses thriving. Nothing in American history has been as effective at reducing black poverty as full employment. Nothing.

Full employment is probably even more effective at reducing black poverty than the statistics above convey. The unemployment rate for blacks is typically more than twice that of whites, so when all whites have jobs, many blacks are still looking for work. If America ever achieves full employment for blacks, the black poverty rate would drop dramatically. The black-white poverty gap would also be substantially reduced.

In making a demand for “a meaningful job at a living wage for every employable citizen,” the SCLC showed that it understood the fundamental facts of poverty: people without work or who work at poverty wages are poor.

As we face the likelihood of the second recession of the decade and the likelihood of increased black poverty, we need to remember SCLC’s poverty fundamentals: full employment at good wages fights poverty. Our elected officials have to power to tell the Federal Reserve to make full employment a national goal. But as SCLC knew, only a movement of the people can make sure that our elected officials do so.

Reference
Robert T. Chase, “Class Resurrection: The Poor People’s Campaign of 1968 and Resurrection City,” Essays in History 40, 1998.


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Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
[The Thora Institute needs you.]

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
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[On the Need for Comprehensive Criminal Justice Reform.]
________________________________________________________________________


“High numbers of black children have fallen from the middle to the bottom of the income distribution,” concludes a study by Julia B. Isaacs done for the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Economic Mobility Project. This is quite a startling finding.

In absolute terms, the black real median family income has increased since the 1970s. This increase has been driven largely by increases in the percent of black women working and by increases in women’s earnings. This picture is basically the same for blacks and whites.

When one examines where children from different class backgrounds end up then the story for blacks and whites is remarkably different. If one looks at the children of white families that were in the middle fifth of the U.S. income distribution 40 years ago, 68 percent of those white children now have a real family income higher than their parents. For blacks, only 31 percent have a higher family income. In other words, a majority of the children of the black middle class are doing worse economically than their parents, but a majority of the children of the white middle class are doing better.

“A startling 45 percent of black children whose parents were solidly middle income end up falling to the bottom income quintile, while only 16 percent of white children born to parents in the middle make this descent,” Isaacs reports.

Although blacks who grew up in the poorest fifth were most likely to end up in the poorest fifth as adults, among blacks it was the poorest group that showed the greatest improvement relative to their parents. Seventy-three percent of them earned more than their parents.

Are These Findings Correct?
There aren’t many longitudinal studies with which to examine these issues. But Isaacs reports that another dataset has similar findings. Thus, this downward mobility finding appears to be true, but it would be nice to have other datasets to examine.

No one has a very good explanation of what could be going on here. Black families who were in the middle fifth of the U.S. income distribution in the late 1960s were likely quite well-off for blacks in the pre-Civil Rights era. Note these families are not in the middle fifth of the black income distribution, but the middle fifth for all U.S. families. If these families became so wealthy during Jim Crow then maybe the end of Jim Crow led then to experience rapid downward mobility. This is admittedly a wild guess.

Anyone with knowledge of a family with parents who were fairly wealthy in the late 1960s whose children ended up relatively poor, please e-mail me that story at contact@thorainstitute.com. What happened? What were the occupations of the parents and children? This is a real mystery.

If the finding of the downward mobility of the black middle class is correct then it seems that the American economy exerts a strong downward pressure on black family income. The downward pressure seems to increase as black incomes increase so that the children of the black middle class have less upward mobility that the children of the black poor.

This research is yet another piece of evidence that the pundits who have been beating up on the black poor are getting it very wrong. The poor from the 1960s were upwardly mobile to a fair degree. It is the black middle class of the 1960s who did not perform up to expectations.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
[The Thora Institute needs you.]

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
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[Find out The Truth about Black Students.]
________________________________________________________________________


Blacks still show the strongest support for a racially integrated America. Whites and Hispanics are much more ambivalent about integration. Sixty-two percent of blacks would like to see more residential integration according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. Fifty percent of Hispanics and 40 percent of whites felt the same.

When asked whether it is more important “to have students go to racially mixed schools even if many of the students don't live nearby, or to have students go to local community schools even if it means most students are of the same race” blacks again show the strongest commitment to racial integration. Fifty-six percent of blacks chose racially integrated schools. Forty-four percent and 23 percent of Hispanics and whites respectively felt the same.

Sixty-five percent of whites favored local schools. The choice by whites for local schools and predominantly-white schools appear to be a big factor in why America’s schools and neighborhoods remain highly segregated. Until whites develop a strong commitment to integrated schools, we will likely continue to see high rate of neighborhood segregation.

Libertarianism and Segregation
Data from the General Social Survey suggests that libertarian values could provide support for segregationist policies. Respondents were asked to choose between two laws:

• A. One law says that a homeowner can decide for himself whom to sell his house to, even if he prefers not to sell to African- Americans; and
• B. The second law says that a homeowner cannot refuse to sell to someone because of their race or color.

The first law received a surprising amount of support.

After pooling data from 1994, 1996 and 2004 to increase the sample size, one finds that 34.6 percent of whites felt that an owner should be able to discriminate against black homebuyers. 19.2 percent of blacks felt the same. However, only 15.5 percent of whites (1994 and 1996 data) agreed that “White people have a right to keep African-Americans out of their neighborhoods if they want to, and African-Americans should respect that right.” So, segregationist policies may receive more support when they are couched in libertarian language.

Most Americans generically support integration. For many whites this support does not appear to be very strong. Support for integration declines when it is put up against libertarian values or local schools. Black Americans continue to be more strongly committed to integration. But integration, like the tango, takes two, and only one group seems to really want to dance.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
[The Thora Institute needs you.]

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
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[Find out The Truth about Black Students.]
________________________________________________________________________

The Pew Research Center report Blacks See Growing Values Gap Between Poor and Middle Class raised many issues but did little to get to the root of them. One of the most intriguing was the finding that 37 percent of blacks say that blacks cannot be thought of as a single race because of the diversity of population. This finding could cut against many common and long-held assumptions about race and collective identity among blacks. The question raises many possible startling interpretations, but ultimately the wording is too ambiguous to be certain what the respondents who agreed were agreeing to.

I argue in Achieving Blackness that people define race in a variety of ways including culturally. Slaveholders in the eighteenth century knew about race, but nothing about DNA. Culture was an important part of their understanding of racial difference. The “Asiatic” racial category used by the Nation of Islam is a good example of an early twentieth century cultural definition. Cultural definitions of race were more common in earlier historical periods, but they have never gone out of existence.

When blacks agree that “Blacks today can no longer be thought of as a single race because the black community is so diverse” it is not completely clear what they are endorsing. If we knew what their definition of race is and what they meant by “diverse,” this response would be much more meaningful. If blacks are agreeing because they are seeing more Northeast African immigrants, who can often be distinguished by physical appearance from multigenerational black Americans, that would be a distinction within a biological conception of race. If the diversity referred to a perceived values diversity among multigenerational black Americans then that would be a cultural definition of race.

If we assume that the distinction is based on cultural values then that would suggest a weakening of the sense of collective identity and linked fate among blacks. Collective identity and linked fate have historically been strong among blacks.

On related but different issue, Juan Williams accused blacks of engaging in “self-defeating black politics” because, in November last year, they supported Hillary Clinton more than Barack Obama. I am still trying to figure out how supporting a white woman is “self-defeating black politics,” but I guess this made sense to somebody. Now black voters are overwhelmingly in support of Obama.

Will Williams declare that the era of “self-defeating black politics” is over because blacks are voting for a black man? We'll see?

Blacks’ support for Obama is likely due in part—in part—to feelings of collective identity and a sense of linked fate. If this is the case then, again, we need more information to understand what is going on with black collective identity. Is it weakening generally or are blacks just distancing themselves from blacks who they see as having bad values. Is blacks' collective racial identity becoming more selective or just weaker? Further research is necessary.

On another related but different issue, the media needs to stop trying to foster black-Hispanic conflict. As I mentioned above, just a few months ago most blacks were for Hillary Clinton. If large numbers of Hispanics are for Clinton, it is mainly because they like Clinton. These folks in the media see race everywhere except when the issue of institutional racial discrimination is raised. Then we are told we live in a color-blind society, and that we need to give up our “self-defeating black politics.”


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
[The Thora Institute needs you.]

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
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[Find out The Truth about Black Students.]
________________________________________________________________________


A few years ago, I overheard a man telling his friend that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the planning of the 9/11 attacks on the United States. This idea has been discredited, but how did this man come to this conclusion? None of the terrorists involved in executing the attack were from Iraq? This idea is counterintuitive to the facts of the attack. Many Americans believed this to be true because government officials stated or insinuated that Hussein planned 9/11. The point here is that authoritative figures who have easy access to the media can shape public opinion.

Last year, the Pew Research Center released a report showing increased pessimism among blacks and increased negative views among blacks toward the black poor. Many of the pundits have assumed that the negative views of the black poor and the pessimism about black America validate their claims of a cultural crisis, but they fail to consider that the black public may be simply repeating ideas that black pundits have been spreading for more than a decade. There is a little bit of evidence in the Pew Survey suggesting that this might be the case.

When asked a factual question about black America, most blacks answered incorrectly. The survey asked respondents if the living standards of blacks were worse or better off relative to whites today compared with ten years ago. By median income, blacks are about at about the same level that they were ten years ago. The correct answer therefore is no change but only 9 percent of blacks said no change.

This is a difficult question for anyone to answer correctly without looking at Census data. How would one know the median income of millions of Americans? It is therefore incorrect for the pundits to treat these responses as facts about the state of black America. They are public opinion. Opinion and facts are different animals.

About 40 percent of blacks believed that blacks were worse off relative to whites, about forty percent believed that blacks were better off. Whites and Hispanics were about equally likely to answer this question incorrectly, but blacks were the most likely to say that blacks were worse off.

Why are blacks most pessimistic about black America? If blacks paid more attention to the cultural crisis claims about blacks that have been circulating for more than a decade then one would expect blacks to be more pessimistic than other groups. Blacks’ responses on the survey seem to support this view.

There are other possibilities. Over the 1990s, rap music became more violent and more obsessed with alcohol and marijuana. Black America experienced less violence over the 1990s and black youth have relatively low rates of substance abuse, but if people fail to appreciate that rap music and videos are fictional then they might see blacks as declining culturally. This view could lead to increased pessimism.

The year 2000 was the heyday for black incomes. The black median income reached its highest point relative to whites and the black poverty rate reached its lowest point on record. The fact that things have been getting worse relative to 2000 could lead to pessimism.

All of these things could be occurring simultaneously. Or other factors may be the real causes. I will be exploring some other factors in my presentation “Understanding the Strange Class War in Black America” at the How Class Works 2008 conference later this year. After the conference, I will report some of my findings here. I encourage other researchers to try to understand the “strange class war in black America” too.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
[The Thora Institute needs you.]

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
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[Find out The Truth about Black Students.]
________________________________________________________________________
[The public opinion piece was pre-empted by the State of the Union.]

Five years ago, we rose above partisan differences to pass the No Child Left Behind Act, preserving local control, raising standards, and holding those schools accountable for results. And because we acted, students are performing better in reading and math, and minority students are closing the achievement gap. -President George W. Bush, State of the Union Address 2007

Six years ago, we came together to pass the No Child Left Behind Act, and today no one can deny its results. Last year, fourth and eighth graders achieved the highest math scores on record. Reading scores are on the rise. African American and Hispanic students posted all-time highs. -President George W. Bush, State of the Union Address 2008

Getting It Wrong debunks many popular myths about the state of black America. One myth is that black students do not value education. The fact of the matter is that black students’ standardized test scores have increased since the 1970s, and, as President George Bush noted in last night’s State of the Union address, black fourth and eighth graders posted impressive increases in standardized test scores recently. (See math trends.)

I have discussed the fact that black students are earning larger shares of all college degrees. The evidence that black students value education and are improving on all measures is overwhelming.

The only people who do not seem to know about black students’ improvements are the leading black public intellectuals. Here is a quote from Juan Williams’ Enough:

. . . it is such a shock, a century later, to find Bill Cosby talking to black people, not whites, when he put the challenge on the table: “What the hell good is Brown if nobody wants it?”
There is no doubt that he is talking about black children who don’t go to school or drop out of school; he is talking about a culture that openly demeans any black student who achieves academic excellence as inauthentic and acting white; he is talking about black parents who accept excuses instead of demanding top grades from their children. (p. 89)

Cosby and Williams get it very wrong here.

First of all, Cosby assumes that we have achieved the goals of Brown. We haven’t. America’s schools are still separate and unequal. They have been becoming more segregated since the 1990s. Cosby wasted a great opportunity to point this out. Instead, he used his speech on the anniversary of Brown to beat up on black students and the black poor. As they say, with friends like these who needs enemies?

Williams’ book was supposed to be the factual basis for Cosby’s Brown anniversary tirade. But Williams too did not spend nearly enough time trying to understand the facts. He mainly repeats popular misinformation. George Bush knows more about black students than he does. To paraphrase, Cosby, come on Williams!, you can do better than that.

Bush is right about black student achievement but he is wrong about No Child Left Behind. Black student achievement improved more rapidly before NCLB than after it. We will have to see if the next round of National Assessment of Educational Progress tests changes the picture at all.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprint this article in your newspaper or magazine. Contact the Thora Institute to purchase reprint rights.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
[The Thora Institute needs you.]

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com
________________________________________________________________________

In addition to being the Director of the Thora Institute LLC, Algernon Austin is now the Director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy of the Economic Policy Institute. A post on black public opinion is coming soon. In the meantime, please read Austin's EPI work "What a Recession Means for Blacks."

[The article publishing schedule has been disrupted by the move to Washington D.C. New articles will continue to be posted but on an irregular schedule in January. By February, the regular schedule will return.]

David Cay Johnston on How the Rich Get Richer

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
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________________________________________________________________________

Updated CBO data reveal unprecedented increase in inequality
by Jared Bernstein

"The increase in income inequality (both pre- and post-tax) as measured by the change in the shares of income going to different income classes, was greater from 2003 to 2005 than over any other two-year period covered by the CBO data. Over these years, an amazing $400 billion in pre-tax dollars was shifted from the bottom 95% of households to those in the top 5% (all income data in this report are inflation adjusted and in 2005 dollars)."

The Thora Institute is in the process of moving to D.C.

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________________________________________________________________________

[A Draft of an op-ed submitted to the New Haven Register.]

Prenatal health care is declining in Connecticut. According to data from the Department of Public Health, the percent of white mothers who failed to receive adequate prenatal care increased from 10 percent to 16 percent between 2000 and 2004 (the date of the most recent data available). The situation was worse for blacks. More than a quarter of black mothers failed to receive adequate prenatal care in 2004, up 8 percentage points from 2000. Hispanic mothers were in a somewhat similar condition to black mothers. More than a quarter of Latina mothers did not receive adequate prenatal care in 2004, up 5 percentage points from 2000.

I take the decline in prenatal care in Connecticut as yet another sign that our health care system is not well. A number of recent reports illustrate this fact. I was alerted to the decline in adequate prenatal care by the Connecticut NAACP’s “A Health Status Report on African Americans in Connecticut” issued this year.

The NAACP report also examined the growing cost of preventable hospitalizations. People without routine medical care tend to end up being rushed by ambulance to emergency rooms when their health care needs are critical. In many cases, these hospitalizations could have been prevented had the patient received routine health care.

In 2000, the cost of preventable hospitalizations was $611 million. By 2004, it had increased 46 percent to $893 million. It is estimated that it will exceed $1.1 billion in 2008. Again, our health care system is not well.

The national picture is quite similar. Large numbers of Americans are unable to obtain needed health care because of the cost. A survey conducted this year by the Rockefeller Foundation found that 17 percent of whites, 20 percent of blacks and 26 percent of Hispanics were unable to see a doctor because of the cost. Eight percent of whites and blacks and 13 percent of Hispanics were unable to take a child to the doctor because of the cost. Twenty percent of all Americans have had to dip into their savings or retirement accounts to pay for medical expenses. Unless our health care system receives a complete overhaul, it seems likely that these numbers will increase.

Many people with health insurance are filled with health care worries. About 40 percent of Americans with health care are worried that they will lose coverage in the near future. The number jumps to almost 60 percent for Hispanics. About half of all people with health care are worried that they might not be able to afford a major hospital stay. Again, for Latinos with health care, it is nearly 60 percent.

What are our options for dealing with an ailing health care system? It seems that if we were to adopt the health care system of just about any other Western developed nation, we would be better off. A recent report by the Commonwealth Fund compares the health care system of the United States with that of Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The U.S. had the lowest overall ranking.

Although the U.S. ranked last, it actually has the highest health care spending per capita. The United Kingdom achieved its top spot by spending less than half of what we do per capita.

Of course, the U.S. will not adopt the health care policy of any other country whole cloth; and we should not. But I have problems with any politician who acts as if there are not important lessons that the U.S. can learn from countries like the United Kingdom that have provided quality health care to all of its citizens at a relatively low cost. Any politician who cavalierly dismisses the practices of Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom as “socialized medicine” simply cannot be thinking about the millions of Americans without health care or even those with health care who are worried that they will not be able to afford it next year.

Not many issues in politics are life and death issues. This one is. Do we have politicians capable enough to take on the challenge of substantive health care reform? Let’s hope so.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

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