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Putting the Census Bureau's Projections in Perspective
We shouldn't let last week's projections on race distract us from next week's real news on poverty.
Despite the frenzy around the Census Bureau’s new projections of the country becoming majority-minority in 2042, what we should really pay attention to is the news that will come out of the Census Bureau next week (on August 26). That’s when we’ll learn how many people in this country lived in poverty in 2007, along with data on income inequality and health care coverage. Poverty rates have been rising for the past few years, and with all of the bad economic news of the past few months, the report on 2007 won’t even begin to forecast the toll that job losses, energy prices, housing foreclosures and the still-to-be-declared recession are having on people right now.
Even beyond rates of absolute poverty (which are totally outdated anyway), we need to examine the growth in inequality and concentrated wealth. There are a lot of resources online that tell us just how bad income inequality is becoming, but according to www.inequality.org the U.S. is experiencing the greatest concentration of wealth since 1928 (that’s the year before the Great Depression hit) and between 1979 and 2005 the top 5% of American families saw their real incomes grow 81% while the bottom 20% saw their incomes decline.
Just in case anyone is tempted to separate economics from race, let’s not forget that the Census Bureau’s data shows that roughly 84% of that richest 5% of the population are White. And at the other end of the economic scale, more than half (54%) of the 12% the population living in poverty in 2006 were Black, Latino, or Asian. The data on child poverty was even more alarming; 66% of the 17.4% of children in poverty were “minorities.”
So rather than get distracted by the possibility of the nation becoming majority-minority in a generation, let’s focus on the current generation of people living in poverty who are already majority-minority.
More on the race-economics hierarchy and Census data.
To this I invited the group to name time periods in history when minority groups of people were in power, and those who were demographically the majority still did not hold much political power. A retired librarian quickly responded that we need not look to history, currently in the US a small section of economically privileged people hold power over large sections of working and middle class people! The discusion became dense when I introduced the intersections of race and class.
Out here in the mid-west I rely upon public transportation to get to my university, and I truly see the face of poverty is mostly colored!