Inequality

There has been inequality in this country since the very beginning when Europeans arrived with indentured servants who had to work off the cost of their passage to the New World, then enslaved men and women, and later their children, borne on ships from Africa, often via the West Indies, first slaves for a period of time, then for life.

One hundred and fifty years ago there was emancipation, but Abraham Lincoln only freed the slaves living in the Union-controlled areas, hoping the news would cause insurrection in the Confederacy, and that the issue of slavery would keep Europe out of America's civil war.

The US fought two world wars with segregated troops.

In 1944, Irene Kirkaldy, a young black woman who was recovering from a miscarriage wouldn't get out of a seat on a bus headed across a state border. She kicked and screamed while being taken off the bus, arrested by a state trooper. Her case was one of the first modern civil rights cases to reach the US Supreme Court. The ruling was that interstate transportation could not be segregated by law. I had the great pleasure of meeting Ms. Kirkaldy, but her mind was already fading. She shared her scrapbook with me over a glass of iced tea in her home in Roosevelt.

The aftermath of inequality by slavery is the inequality of wealth. Not just class, but wealth. Institutional racism has allowed white people to accumulate stuff to pass onto their children. Until recently home ownership was the key to this accumulation for the working and middle classes. That dream disappeared for many as greedy mortgage brokers lured homeowners-- white, black, and brown-- into using their homes as ATM machines for cars, vacations, and consumer spending, instead of using them as piggy banks for college educations for their children and retirement.

Yesterday the Pew Hispanic Center released a new report that shows home ownership decreasing more drastically for blacks and browns than for whites in this post-subprime meltdown.

"The boom-and-bust cycle in the U.S. housing market over the past decade and a half has generated greater gains and larger losses for minority groups than it has for whites."

"Overall, the ups and downs in the housing market since 1995 have reduced the homeownership gap between whites and all racial and ethnic minority groups. However, a substantial gap persists. As of 2008, 74.9% of whites owned homes, compared with 59.1% of Asians, 48.9% of Hispanics and 47.5% of blacks."

"At the same time, blacks and Latinos remain far more likely than whites to borrow in the subprime market where loans are usually higher priced. In 2007, 27.6% of home purchase loans to Hispanics and 33.5% to blacks were higher-priced loans, compared with just 10.5% of home purchase loans to whites that year."

Many of the African American homeowners who purchased subprime mortgages at higher interest rates could have qualified for regular mortgages, but someone's greed sold them the higher commissioned mortgages instead.

Inequality exists because of racism, discrimination, and unregulated markets that prey on people just because of the color of their skin.

Inequality exists despite the fact that our president is a man of color.

There is no such thing as post-racialism in America. Not yet. Not without a helluva lot of work to do.