The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [115]
It is through this quintessentially American path of upward mobility that the black middle class has grown fourfold in a generation, and that the black poverty rate was cut in half. Through a similar process of hard work and commitment to family, Latinos have seen comparable gains: From 1979 to 1999, the number of Latino families considered middle class has grown by more than 70 percent. In their hopes and expectations, these black and Latino workers are largely indistinguishable from their white counterparts. They are the people who make our economy run and our democracy flourish—the teachers, mechanics, nurses, computer technicians, assembly-line workers, bus drivers, postal workers, store managers, plumbers, and repairmen who constitute America’s vital heart.
And yet, for all the progress that’s been made in the past four decades, a stubborn gap remains between the living standards of black, Latino, and white workers. The average black wage is 75 percent of the average white wage; the average Latino wage is 71 percent of the average white wage. Black median net worth is about $6,000, and Latino median net worth is about $8,000, compared to $88,000 for whites. When laid off from their job or confronted with a family emergency, blacks and Latinos have less savings to draw on, and parents are less able to lend their children a helping hand. Even middle-class blacks and Latinos pay more for insurance, are less likely to own their own homes, and suffer poorer health than Americans as a whole. More minorities may be living the American dream, but their hold on that dream remains tenuous.
How we close this persistent gap—and how much of a role government should play in achieving that goal—remains one of the central controversies of American politics. But there should be some strategies we can all agree on. We might start with completing the unfinished business of the civil rights movement—namely, enforcing nondiscrimination laws in such basic areas as employment, housing, and education. Anyone who thinks that such enforcement is no longer needed should pay a visit to one of the suburban office parks in their area and count the number of blacks employed there, even in the relatively unskilled jobs, or stop by a local trade union hall and inquire as to the number of blacks in the apprenticeship program, or read recent studies showing that real estate brokers continue to steer prospective black homeowners away from predominantly white neighborhoods. Unless you live in a state without many black residents, I think you’ll agree that something’s amiss.
Under recent Republican Administrations, such enforcement of civil rights laws has been tepid at best, and under the current Administration, it’s been essentially nonexistent—unless one counts the eagerness of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to label university scholarship or educational enrichment programs targeted at minority students as “reverse discrimination,” no matter how underrepresented minority students may be in a particular institution or field, and no matter how incidental the program’s impact on white students.
This should be a source of concern across the political spectrum, even to those who oppose affirmative action. Affirmative action programs, when properly structured, can open up opportunities otherwise closed to qualified minorities without diminishing opportunities for white students. Given the dearth of black and Latino Ph.D. candidates in mathematics and the physical sciences, for example, a modest scholarship program for minorities interested in getting advanced degrees in these fields (a recent target of a Justice Department inquiry) won’t keep white students out of such programs, but can broaden the pool of talent that America will need for all of us to prosper in a