Prometheus 6

Urban League Paints Dismal Portrait of Black America

Posted March 24, 2004 -- Fifty years after the Brown decision and 40 years after the Civil Rights Act, the quality of life for Black Americans, by most social and economic indicators, is far worse than that of White Americans, the National Urban League says in a new study.

African Americans are poorer, unhealthier, less educated, more discriminated against when it comes to housing and the criminal justice system, and they are less likely to seek remedy through the nation's political system, the League says in its annual report on the State of Black America.

One of the starkest contrasts between Blacks and Whites, the Urban League found, pertained to the wealth gap. When it comes to homeownership and family income, Black Americans are suffering.

According to Samuel Myers, Jr., one of the report's co-authors, as the overall U.S. economy prospered, between 1990 to 2000, so did the economic condition of Black America. Household incomes rose and the wage gap between Blacks and Whites narrowed; the poverty gap also slimmed. In recent years, however, the racial chasm has widened notably, the report says.

"Although the boom brought increased incomes, higher levels of employment, and falling poverty rates for many African Americans, few were able to translate these income gains into permanent assets," writes Myers. "Debt among [B]lacks remains high-much higher than it is among [W]hites. There is a paucity of financial assets, with [B]lacks holding much of their wealth in their homes.

Mortgage interest rates fell to unprecedented levels, but fewer and fewer African Americans applied for these conventional loans. Home ownership increased during the boom, but by the end of the decade, the gap in home ownership persisted within different income ranges."

Slightly more than two-thirds of all Americans and three-quarters of Whites Americans own their home, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, In contrast, Census says, fewer than half of Blacks and Latinos (48 percent) and 54 percent of Asian Americans own their homes. A persistent problem, according to the Urban League, is that Blacks are denied mortgages and home improvement loans at a rate twice that of Whites.

The education gap is also disturbingly wide, the report says. While the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision guaranteed equal access to schools for Black children, the achievement of African American students lags behind that of their White counterparts.

There are numerous obstacles to learning that that many Black children uniquely are forced to cope with, Dr. Edmund Gordon, a professor of education, concludes in the report.

Among the most challenging hurdles, he says, are high family and community poverty rates; lower levels of education among parents; the high turnover and lack of skills among those teaching Black children; and low academic expectations and damaging effects of "ingrained negative stereotypes of them," Gordon says.

"Taken together, these and other sources of academic disparities continue to produce the ubiquitous under-representation of minorities among top academic achieving students," he says.

Health is also a major concern among Black Americans, according to the report. Not only do Blacks have higher rates of illness and death than Whites exist, but - in more ways than one - racism has a direct effect on the overall health of African Americans.

Says Dr. David R. Williams, who penned the health section of the report, "[R]acism adversely affects the health of African Americans in multiple ways that include the physical, such as the impact of residential segregation, and the psychological and physiological, such as the stress created by the subjective experience of discrimination."

Those racial differences also include the access that Blacks have to medical care, Williams says. The fact that African Americans have greater need for medical care due to higher levels of illness, they are more likely to be denied quality attention, he writes.

"There are systematic racial differences in the quality of care," he says. "For virtually every type of therapeutic procedure, ranging from high technology interventions to the most basic diagnostic and treatment procedures, Blacks and other minorities are less likely to receive medical procedures and to experience poorer quality medical care than Whites."

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that African Americans are still under-represented among health professionals, he says. "There has been only a relatively small increase in the proportion of African American physicians in medicine in the last thirty years," he says.

Williams urges that policies are established to address "fundamental non-medical" inequalities, because "improved medical care alone is unlikely to eliminate racial inequalities…."1

"America's large and persisting racial differences in health fly in the face of cherished American principles of equality. In fact, however, the health of black Americans can be viewed as the visible tip of an iceberg that reflects conditions increasing health risks throughout the population as a whole."