The Black Informant

According to the authors of this article, the answer is yes.

Economy, not culture, responsible for black-white gap

By Algernon Austin and Jared Bernstein Special to The Baltimore Sun

(sltrib.com) “For decades, scholars and opinion-makers have been seduced by cultural explanations for economic problems. Recently, comedian Bill Cosby has caught the bug, leading him to inveigh against aspects of black culture he views as intimately linked to problems among African-Americans, from poverty to crime and incarceration.

Cosby is merely the latest and most visible in a long chain of cultural critics. Researcher Charles Murray (before turning to genetic explanations) and columnist Thomas Sowell have been making the “bad culture” argument about African-Americans for decades. David Brooks has a long-running column in The New York Times linking culture and economic outcomes.

This work is misguided at best and destructive at worst.

One key to the success of the cultural argument is the omission of inconvenient facts about social and economic trends. For example, people arguing that African-Americans are suffering from a culture of poverty stress that blacks are much more likely to be poor than whites. True, but this fact misses the most important development about black poverty in recent years: its steep decline during the 1990s.

Black poverty fell 10.6 percentage points from 1993 to 2000 (from 33.1 to 22.5 percent) to reach its lowest level on record. Black child poverty fell an unprecedented 10.7 percentage points in five years (from 41.9 percent in 1995 to 31.2 percent in 2000).

The “culture of poverty” argument cannot explain these trends. Poor black people did not develop a “culture of uccess” in 1993 and then abandon it for a “culture of failure” in 2001.

What really happened was that in the 1990s, the job market finally tightened up to the point where less-advantaged workers had a bit of bargaining clout. The full-employment economy offered all comers opportunities conspicuously absent before or since. Since 2000, black employment rates have fallen much faster, and poverty rates have risen faster, than the average.

What this episode reveals is how we squander our human resources when slack in the economy yields too few decent employment opportunities for those who want to work.” (more…)

Just as I was willing to accept this piece at face value, there were a few things I noticed were being left out of this picture:

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-During the 1990’s, illegal immigration was at a minimum in comparison to today’s market. Illegals tend to gravitate towards the same sectors (blue collar, labor, manufacturing) as many Black folks.

-Since 9/11, many of these same sectors have gone through major transitions that include massive layoffs and overseas relocations.

-An incarceration rate that has not decreased in decades:(At least, based on the studies I have seen). The disproportionate amount of Black men we have in the prison system directly affects our income potential as a community. Even when many of these men do get out of prison, many employers are not too anxious on hiring them. There are plenty who do get around this hurdle, but it usually requires a lot more work than the average employee.

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My third point leads me back to my disagreement with the writers of this article as they appear to minimize the effects of fractured culture. A findings of a recent survey concluded that most men who end up in prison come from broken homes. If this is the case (and from my experience it is), then home life does in fact play a key role in our overall income potential.

My Own Experiences

With a work history that spans over twenty years, the one theme that has remained consistent is that attitude does affect your altitude. Across the board, folks who spent too much time looking for reasons why they were not successful in the workplace usually stayed in the same type of jobs they often complain about. When I would suggest to them that they should make themselves more marketable by taking additional courses or go the extra mile within their present position by doing minor things that you are not getting paid to do, in most cases the suggestion was buried by the shovel of “I’ll think about it.” Just as I have hit roadblocks in my career by White folks who apparently did not want to see me move ahead, I have also hit similar roadblocks under Black management. On the other hand (based on my own experiences), folks that do some of the suggestions I mentioned above typically have very little problem finding employment–or they just start their own business.

A few years ago, with very little prospects in the IT market where I lived at the time, I took a job as a night security officer. While many of my co-workers spent a bulk of their time complaining about management (the usual- racism, “They’re too uppity”, “He doesn’t care about us”), I was doing all I could to learn the job so that I could move up to make more money. After all, I had mouths to feed, rent, and bills to pay. Within a few weeks on being on the job, my supervisor at the time asked me if I wanted to be night supervisor. Mind you, I had only been there for a few weeks while my other co-workers had been there much longer. My supervisor told me that the reason why he wanted me in the position was because the other team members had proven to be unreliable (showed up late for work without calling, not performing simple on the job tasks, etc.). On the other hand, this supervisor was going to school on his off days while driving close to 70 miles one way to go to work. So like me, he had very little time for “mess”. Most of these other employees lived much closer. When I decided to take the position, all the negativity and hate erupted out of nowhere. Where before I was one of regular guys, now I became “one of them”!

While I can easily agree that discrimination does exist in the American workplace, based on my own experiences, the experiences of other Black folks in and out of my life over the years and a full view of the facts, this claim is not enough to be the unmovable mountain that is blocking Black progress. The economy in general is a road filled with obstacles that in most cases can be avoided.