It's time to get down to the of the matter, cont'd
THREE YEARS HAVE PASSED.
In county jail, Michael was brutally attacked by another inmate.
Even though Michael did nothing to provoke the attack, both men were charged with felony assault.
Michael has been released from prison, but now has a criminal record.
As a result, he has been unable to find steady work since getting out.
Even as the unemployment rate for African-Americans fell close to its pre-pandemic low of 5.4 percent with a recent low level fell for 5.8 percent for one month in June of this year, it was almost twice as high as the unemployment rate for White workers.
Moreover, substantial racial wage gaps remained, even amid this rapid recovery that initially favored wage gains in occupations and industries where many people of color work. Measured in inflation adjusted terms, Black workers earned roughly 79 cents for each dollar in median weekly earnings for White workers in 2021 and 2022. These wage gaps have shown no sign of shrinking, even as employers are still struggling to find more workers and millions of people of color are looking for jobs but are not being hired.
Black men in particular have taken a major hit. Although certain government statistics suggest that the earnings gap between Black and White men has decreased over the past seven decades, those numbers are misleading. In fact, when you take into account the people who don't work at all (instead of counting the wages of only the people who are working), the Black-White wage gap is actually about the same as it was in 1950. There are two main reasons for this: 1) Many Black men have dropped out of the labor force and are not actively looking for work. 2) Many Black men are incarcerated.
An economist and the dean of the Yale School of Management, along with a researcher from Duke University, released the following:
"We study two measures: (i) the level earnings gap — the racial earnings difference at a given quantile; and (ii) the earnings rank gap — the difference between a Black man's percentile in the Black earnings distribution and the position he would hold in the White earnings distribution. After narrowing from 1940 to the mid-1970s, the median Black–White level earnings gap has since grown as large as it was in 1950. At the same time, the median Black man's relative position in the earnings distribution has remained essentially constant since 1940, so that the improvement then worsening of median relative earnings have come mainly from the stretching and narrowing of the overall earnings distribution. Black men at higher percentiles have experienced significant advances in relative earnings since 1940, due mainly to strong positional gains among those with college educations. Large relative schooling gains by Blacks at the median and below have been more than counteracted by rising return to skill in the labor market, which has increasingly penalized remaining racial differences in schooling at the bottom of the distribution." Read the entire report here.
Michael's family loses their Temporary Assistance for
Needy Families (TANF) benefits because he has been unable to find work.
TANF assistance has a maximum benefit of two consecutive years (with a five-year lifetime limit) and requires recipients to find work within two years of receiving assistance.
He was also recently diagnosed with non-diabetic kidney disease.
The Atlantic magazine reports that "across the United States, Black people suffer disproportionately from some of the most devastating health problems, from cancer deaths and diabetes to maternal mortality and preterm births. Although the racial disparity in early death has narrowed in recent decades, Black people have the life expectancy, nationwide, that White people had in the 1980s — about three years shorter than the current white life expectancy. African Americans face a greater risk of death at practically every stage of life."
"In Baltimore, a 20-year gap in life expectancy exists between the city’s poor, largely African American neighborhoods and its wealthier, whiter areas. A baby born in Cheswolde, in Baltimore’s far-northwest corner, can expect to live until age 87. Nine miles away in Clifton-Berea, the life expectancy is 67, roughly the same as that of Rwanda, and 12 years shorter than the American average. Similar disparities exist in other segregated cities, such as Philadelphia and Chicago." According to the Economic Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank:
"African Americans experience diabetes, hypertension, and asthma at higher rates than Whites. The greatest racial disparities exist in the prevalence of diabetes (1.7 times as likely among African Americans as among Whites) and hypertension (1.4 times as likely)."
"Air pollution has long been known to increase risk of heart and respiratory disease, heart attacks, asthma attacks, bronchitis, and lung cancer. Therefore, environmental racism — the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on health outcomes among people of color — is a contributing factor to these racial health disparities. According to a 2018 report by a group of scientists at the EPA National Center for Environmental Assessment, published in the American Journal of Public Health, people of color are disproportionately affected by air pollution due to their proximity to particulate-matter-emitting facilities. African Americans suffer the most, with exposure 54 percent above average."
Michael and Angela are left with no options.
They move into a government housing facility in a dangerous, high-crime neighborhood.
Their son, James, is now four years old.
It's time for him to head to school.
The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) – commonly referred to as The Nation’s Report Card – was released in October 2022. The results were, in the words of U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona “appalling and unacceptable.”
The report revealed that only 36 percent of 4th graders and 26 percent of 8th graders perform at or above the Proficient level in math, a level that represents “sold academic performance.” Only 33 percent of 4th graders and 31 percent of 8th graders perform at or above the Proficient level in reading.
Breaking the numbers down by race is absolutely devastating. In 4th grade math, there is a 33-point score gap between White and Black students (48 percent to 15 percent). In 8th grade math, there is a 26-point score gap between White and Black students (35 percent to 9 percent).
In 4th grade reading, there is a 25-point score gap between White and Black students (42 percent to 17 percent). In 8th grade reading, there is a 22-point score gap between White and Black students (38 percent to 16 percent).
In 2010, the Grad Nation Campaign – led by General Colin Powell and his wife Alma – was launched to address the increasingly concerning national high school dropout rate, which then persistently hovered around 70 percent. The Grad Nation Campaign released an annual report called Building a Grad Nation. The final report was released in 2023.
From the final report: “While Black students have spurred gains nationally, their graduation rates continue to lag those of White students. In 2020, the graduation gap between Black and White students stood at 9.2 percentage points.
In 2020, Black students accounted for 15.3 percent of the graduating cohort, but were overrepresented among the nation’s non-graduates, at 21.4 percent. This disproportion is especially prevalent across southern states. Nine of the ten states with the highest rates of Black students failing to graduate on-time were in the South. In each of these nine states, more than 30 percent of non-graduating students were Black. In Mississippi and Louisiana more than half of the students not graduating on-time in 2020 were Black.”
FIFTEEN YEARS PASS.
Meet James, a Black man who lives in Austin, Texas. One of James’ earliest memories is hysterically crying while trying to revive his father, Michael, who collapsed from kidney disease. His dad died two days later.
His mother was devastated by the loss but was pregnant and had to support her family. James knew his mom had become a prostitute, and men would come and go all day and night. A couple of them had been nice to him, but those didn’t seem to last very long. The others would beat him, mock him, have sex with his mother in front of him, burn him with cigarettes and force him to try marijuana at the age of seven.
Once in a while, his mom would ask him to deliver little packages around their decrepit apartment complex, instructing him to bring back the money he was given in return. His best buddy lived next door and they would leave really early on summer mornings and roam around the neighborhood until well after dark. After wheezing most of his life, the school nurse determined James had acute asthma, but he never got the proper medication to ease it.
When he was sixteen, his mom was diagnosed with a life-threatening heart condition, so he dropped out of high school to work full time to support her.
James’ life has been difficult to say the least, but things are turning around! He recently got his GED, received a small pay raise at work, and married the love of his life, the very beautiful Kimberly. James and Kimberly just had their first child, a perfect baby boy, and they are ready to buy their first home. Everything is looking up for James!
Let’s take this journey with James and Kimberly. The first stop is house hunting….