To understand the economic, cultural and political progress of Black Americans, it helps to look locally.
Brookings researchers released the Black Progress Index with a dozen factors they say are predictive of Black empowerment. It tells a story of entwined issues in American society.
That’s from Black Power Scorecard: Measuring the Racial Gap and What We Can Do to Close It, the new book from Andre Perry, a fellow of the Brookings Institution.
Below I share my notes for future reference
My notes:
- “White supremacy seeks to install privileges based on a racial hierarchy, while Black power seeks to remove privileges based on race.”
- Gloria Wekker: “racial grammar”
- CROWN Act Legislation on hair style protections
- “Being better capitalists will not significantly advance the Black community’s socioeconomic status”
- Grammy winners and Black billionaires don’t equate “collective advantage”
- Jonathan Rothwell and author: social determinants of well being: wealth, homeownership, education and built environment
- author developed Black Progress Index
- “Wealth predicts educational outcomes, not the other way around.”
- “Unionization is the fundamental strategy for enhancing the socioeconomic status of black workers”
- “Having a Black slave owner, or even two, would not have been better for black communities. Nor is a billionaire, or even two.” — references the Jay Z song Family Feud
- Manning Marable’s 1983 How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: “Capitalist development has occurred not in spite of the exclusion of blacks, but because of the brutal exploitation of blacks as workers and consumers.”
- Argues the post-Civil Rights Black capitalism movement “mostly failed” black people
- He prefers median wealth as a metric — “a measure of collective power”
- Jazz comes from New Orleans Congo square
- Author dismisses arguments like the 2017 book by Jason L Riley False Black Power, which argues racial progress has been made. The author says it isn’t a yes/no question, calling for “a more useful framework to measure progress and power”
- His Black Power Index identified 13 variables that affected life expectancy
- Author lives and reps Maryland’s PG County
- Casey Breen: homeownership drives life expectancy, not just correlated
- Presence of Black immigrants is a big determinant
- John Ogbu: involuntary and voluntary minorities
- “The positive benefits of immigration status seem to dissipate with every passing generation, suggesting that American racism is bad for your health.”
- Brooking’s 2020 How Social Networks Impact Economic Mobility: longer mean distance of friendships mean broader networks and correlate to health
- Anita Chandra allostatic load
- “American society is dependent upon racism and anti-black violence for its proper functioning, whereby black suffering is an instrument for suicidal growth”
- Signs of local success in Black progress have lessons (so author doesn’t want to show general signs of progress but specific ones: the country hasn’t progressed but places have)
- 40 acres and a mule from actual meeting with 20 ministers
- “Despite its numerous challenges, Baltimore places highly when it comes to Black business ownership, ranking in the 84th percentile. However, most of the Black-owned businesses in the city’s metro area are sole proprietorships.”
- There are 2,331 Black-owned businesses with employees, which make up just 4.5 percent of all businesses in the metropolitan area. If the number of Black-owned businesses matched the city’s Black population of 31.3 percent, there would be a total of 22,862 Black-owned businesses. This means 20,531 more businesses would be added to reach that 31.3 percent share.“
- His review of highly rated Businesses on Yelp: white neighborhood biz earned 8.5-9% revenue more (“Our Ice is just as cold”)
- “The word ‘developer garners the same side eye from black residents as insurance man and police officer.”
- But Chicago TREND and others are trying to change that
- Black businesses more sole proprietorship: 2.7% employee business is black owned
- Gallup 2024 personality traits of entrepreneurs
- 2018 Journal of Urbanism enhancing economic conditions for business also helped individuals and communities
- Big metropolises saw black owned businesses grow from 2017-2021, though St. Louis saw a stark decline
- Net home equity drove most black wealth; business equity was most
- 2024 Gallup: parents who started businesses more predictive of kids than other factors
- Even at the higher rates of black business creation in 2021 as tracked by the census bureau was annual business survey, including growth in employee count, revenue and payroll, compared to other employer businesses, the author says it would take another 80 years for black businesses to reach parody with a black population share
- VC capital deals: just 1% to all Black teams
- Zeal Capital gets a shoutout (Technical.ly follows the DC-founded firm)
- Brookings’s The Public Wealth of Cities recommends urban wealth funds
- For every “standard increase” in black homeownership, life expectancy goes up 0.61 years
- 2018: author part of team that showed 23% lower value in black neighborhoods than white
- In 2020, black homeownership was the same as in 1968 when the Fair Housing Act was enacted
- Special Purpose credit program for housing like BOFA’s
- Parity Homes in Baltimore (whom Technical.ly covers)
- Author makes clear to say Black fathers who are engaged are as engaged as any — book balances the cultural factors and systemic factors of racial disparity
- 1967 Loving vs US on interracial marriage
- William Julius Wilson “marriageable male” in Truly Disadvantaged (1987)
- Wealth is a precondition to marriage he says, not just an outcome
- 2011 Harvard Daniel Schneider: assets predicted wealth
- 2016 Journal of the Social Sciences Eads and Tach: wealth also sustains a marriage
- 2013 Journal of Marriage and Family. BY Addo and lichter look at chicken and egg of marriage and wealth
- Henry and Charlotte Seaborn and the joint tax return
- Author argues the 1965 Moynihan Report put responsibility on black families especially matriarchal culture
- Black Americans are a third of prison population
- “In counties where black adults aged 25 and over possess at least a bachelors degree, there is an additional 0.38 years of life expectancy for every standard increase in this educational level. Similarly life expectancy increases by 0.45 years for every standard increase in the percentage of black students scoring at or above proficiency in statewide math exams”
- John Dewey: “ education is not preparation for life; education is life itself”
- Each increase in income level extends blank lifespan by 18 months
- “Examining the wage distribution reveals a clear pattern: at the 10th percentile, Black workers earned $9.61, which amounts to 91 percent of the $10.56 that white workers earned. The wage in the middle or median among all Black workers was $16.12, representing 75.6 percent of the white median wage of $21.32. The disparity becomes particularly pronounced at the 95th percentile, where Black workers earned $47.94, just 65.3 percent of the $73.38 earned by white workers in the same wage bracket.”
- Cites union growth
- ((Author argues that Amazon hiring recently incarcerated people is an anti union move because they wouldn’t want a union to risk jobs, but isn’t hiring recently incarcerated people a good?))
- Boston and California task force on reparations
- William Darrity and Kirsten Mullen 2022 book on reparations argues not local distractions but focus instead on congressional act: “true reparations only can come from a full scale program of acknowledgment, redress enclosure for a grievous injustice”
- Cori Bush’s $14 trillion plan for reparations
- Reparations: restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction and non repetition