Wednesday, September 21, 2011

The White Racial Frame in Action: Black Folks are Winning in the Great Recession Because Their Unemployment Rate is "Only" 27.4 Percent

Are you always complaining negroes happy now? White folks in suburbia are suffering more than they have in recent memory during this, our time of the Great Recession.

How did you black folks find a way to turn this situation to your advantage? It must be President Obama and his special racial set asides which have helped you all over-perform in this down economy.

So selfish you are...

But more seriously, who writes this sort of tripe? And how can they do it with a straight face?

The white racial frame is real folks. Here is more proof.

From CNBC:

Welcome to the Suburban Depression

The prolonged economic slump we've been in since before the financial crisis really is different than recent recession experiences, especially when it comes to those who now live in poverty.

The official U.S. poverty rate in 2007 was 12.5 percent. Following the calamities of 2008 it climbed upward and kept climbing. By 2009, the rate was 14.3 percent. In 2010 it went to 15.1 percent, according to U.S. Census data reviewed by Pro Publica.

There has not been so large a portion of Americans in poverty since 1993. But this time the growth in poverty is different, hitting whites and suburbia harder than it did during the early 1990s slump. African Americans, by contrast, appear to be doing better.

The poverty rate for whites was 13 percent in 2010. That compares to 12.2 percent in 1993, according to the Census Bureau.

The suburban poverty rate is 11.8 percent, a level not seen since 1967.

African Americans appear to be faring relatively better than they did in the early 1990s. In 1993 the poverty rate for African Americans reached 33.1 percent. Last year it was 27.4 percent.

It's not entirely clear why African Americans are faring so much better in this recession than in the last, at least in terms of poverty. It may be that social and economic progress in the intervening years has left African Americans less vulnerable to economic downturns.

A key factor in the rise in suburban poverty may be the fact that the housing market has played such a central role in the economic slump.

Many suburbs have seen a vast amount of wealth erased by declining housing markets and mortgage foreclosures, resulting in a great deal of economic dislocation. Since white Americans are more likely to own homes than African Americans, this could also explain why whites have fared worse than they did in the 1990s while African Americans have fared better.

5 comments:

gordon gartrelle said...

Great piece.

But check out the final paragraph at the wiki for "White Racial Frame." A (presumably white) editor was hurt by the entry:


This is the most racist article that has been published herein as a serious study of human behavior. Anyone reading this will have a clear understanding of how lumping an entire race into a category of racists and bigots by claiming an underlying sense of racial superiority is prevalent in the psyche of most white Americans can be beyond divisive to the point of intellectual dishonesty. Such an assault, if leveled on any other race would be deemed hate speech. Shame on you and your hate filled heart.

Talk about irony.

chaunceydevega said...

There you are. What you been up to and hiding?

Causing trouble I imagine...

Triptych said...

Oh child.
Where was racism implied in that at all?

The poverty rate for whites has risen and the poverty rate for blacks has gone down. Nothing else was implied~

chaunceydevega said...

@Trip. You be kidding child. White pain, significantly less than others is framed as the "crisis." Black suffering as a gain...not as bad as before. One patient is dead, the other is still on life support and doing relatively okay, even if hurting, but the tragedy is the latter, the former framed as a triumph.

Free your mind.

But I would bet you are kidding.

afrodiction said...

@gordon gatrelle: That wiki epilogue no longer exists. *whistles* Though maybe it should have been left there so everybody could see all that nonsense.

@Triptych: Where is the racism? How about the hand-wringing that occurs when White poverty jumps .8% over the course of 17 years, while the 6% decrease for Blacks over the same period is touted as an Olympic victory.

To be sure, we should be happy for decreases, but to have such a disproportionate poverty/population rate is itself shameful; writing as though all Black socio-economic woes are over is rather stupid.