The Great Class Stratification also has a racial component. Among whites, there are great differences between the wealthy and the rest. But whites as a group are pulling away from African Americans and Hispanic Americans.
In 1995, the average white had 7 times the wealth of an average African American or Hispanic American. Now? It's 20 to 1 for African Americans and 18 to 1 for Hispanics. Think about that. We're not making progress: we're going backwards.
The wealth gaps between whites and minorities have grown to their widest levels in a quarter-century. The recession and uneven recovery have erased decades of minority gains, leaving whites on average with 20 times the net worth of blacks and 18 times that of Hispanics, according to an analysis of new Census data.
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"I am afraid that this pushes us back to what the Kerner Commission characterized as 'two societies, separate and unequal,'" said Roderick Harrison, a former chief of racial statistics at the Census Bureau, referring to the 1960s presidential commission that examined U.S. race relations.
"The great difference is that the second society has now become both black and Hispanic."
msnbc.com
"What's pushing the wealth of whites is the rebound in the stock market and corporate savings, while younger Hispanics and African-Americans who bought homes in the last decade — because that was the American dream — are seeing big declines," said Timothy Smeeding, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who specializes in income inequality.
The median wealth of white U.S. households in 2009 was $113,149, compared with $6,325 for Hispanics and $5,677 for blacks, according to the analysis released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center. Those ratios, roughly 20 to 1 for blacks and 18 to 1 for Hispanics, far exceed the low mark of 7 to 1 for both groups reached in 1995, when the nation's economic expansion lifted many low-income groups to the middle class.
msnbc.com
No amount of "austerity" will solve these differences. In fact, austerity will exacerbate them.
I remember a book I read when I was in high school in the early 1970s: "The Fire Next Time" by James Baldwin.
The title comes from the old Negro spiritual "Mary Don't You Weep" and the line, "God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water the fire next time."
The Fire Next Time" was also became the title of the radical group Students for a Democratic Society's newspaper out of Chicago from 1969-1970? (with at least three issues); the final issue titled just "Fire!". However, this was after the publication of Baldwin's essays in 1963.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Some quotes:
At the center of this dreadful storm, this vast confusion, stand the black people of this nation, who must now share the fate of a nation that has never accepted them, to which they were brought in chains. Well, if this is so, one has no choice but to do all in one’s power to change that fate, and at no matter what risk—eviction, imprisonment, torture, death. (104)
6. “The Negroes of this country may never be able to rise to power, but they are very well placed indeed to precipitate chaos and ring down the curtain on the American dream” (88).
7. I know that what I'm asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is least that one can demand—and one is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible. (104)
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Do you whites think that you can keep down millions of people forever? The election of Barack Obama is progress, but it is not enough.
We cannot have "two societies, separate and unequal". There can not be an overclass of whites (even with stratification within that overclass) and an underclass of African Americans and Hispanics. It's wrong. And if we all don't change it, this nation will reap the consequences of its immorality.
"God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water the fire next time."