The March to Equality Marks Time

The emergence and increasing visibility of a Negro middle class may beguile the nation into supposing that the circumstances of the remainder of the Negro community are equally prosperous, whereas just the opposite is true at present, and is likely to continue so.

That warning from Sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan seems to be more urgent now than when he wrote it as an adviser to President Johnson in 1965. Then, a rapidly expanding economy and vigorous Government efforts to curb racial discrimination helped an unprecedented proportion of U.S. blacks to start closing educational, occupational and economic gaps that separated them from whites. This progress recently seems to have been halted or even reversed. A disturbingly large number of blacks are in relatively worse positions than they were three years ago.

These are the inescapable conclusions from a new U.S. Census Bureau report, "The Social and Economic Status of the Black Population in the United States, 1972." Its 79 pages of tables, based on the 1970 census and a survey of 50,000 families, disclose that:

>Black family income is declining in relation to white family income. Nationally, nonwhite families earn about $7,100, only 62% of what white families earn; the ratio has dropped two percentage points in the past two years.

Blacks alone actually earn somewhat less than other nonwhite families. Only 6% of black families--those narrowly defined as husband-wife units headed by someone under 35 and living in the North and West--have incomes roughly equal to white families of the same statistical profile.

> In an encouraging development, black women with college educations take home annually as much as white women do, roughly $7,200 on the average. But black men continue to make substantially less than whites. Black male college graduates over 35 earn about $9,300, or about $300 less than white high school graduates of the same age. Younger black college graduates do slightly better than white high-schoolers, but their median income of $8,700 is well below the $9,200 median for white college dropouts. These differentials have lessened only slightly over the past five years.

> Black families are far more dependent than white families upon the earnings of wives. Black working wives contribute a substantially higher proportion of family income (32%) than do white wives (26%). More than a third of all black families are headed by women, v. a bit more than a fourth in 1968. By contrast, the proportion of white families headed by females has increased only from 8.9% to 9.6%. Female-headed families are almost twice as likely as two-parent families to have incomes below the officially established poverty level.

> Black poverty is increasing, while white poverty has declined sharply. Some 300,000 blacks last year slipped below the poverty line (now $4,275 for an urban family of four), while 1.6 million whites climbed above it. More than a third of all blacks--almost the same proportion as in 1968 --are now classed as poor, compared with 9% of whites. One reason for the disparity: the old 2-to-l ratio of black-to-white unemployment has reappeared after declining in 1970 and 1971. Unemployment now strikes 9.3% of the nonwhite labor force and 4.1% of the white labor force.

These findings suggest that Social Analysts Ben J. Wattenberg and Richard M. Scammon have overestimated the extent of black economic progress. In a widely publicized article published in the April Commentary, they contended that a "slender majority" of black Americans could now be called "middle class"--by which they meant able to afford decent food, shelter and clothing. By the measure that black scholars prefer, the $11,500 annual income that the Government says is needed for an urban family of four to enjoy an "intermediate standard of living," only about one nonwhite family in four qualifies, a proportion that has not changed since 1969. More important, the persistence of earning differentials between black and white males in almost every educational category supports the conclusion of Herrington Bryce, research director for the Washington-based Joint Center for Political Studies: "The structural problem --the discriminatory labor market--still remains."

Growing Schism. One reason that it does, say many black researchers, is that the Nixon Administration is easing away from the Government's commitment to the cause of black equality. President Nixon has begun to break up the Office of Economic Opportunity, slashed more than $1 billion from the annual budgets of programs to hire and train the hard-core unemployed for public-service jobs, and abandoned the "Philadelphia Plan" and other "home town" programs for increasing black employment. Another problem has been an erratic economy; its consequences, as usual, have fallen with disproportionate harshness on blacks. Says Robert Hill, research director of the National Urban League: "The recession of 1969-70 had an effect on blacks from which we have never recovered."

More important than any act on the part of the Administration, the scholars say, is the climate of indifference to black problems that the Administration has created. Psychologist Kenneth B. Clark charges that the President, by taking a tough line on welfare and sending the Justice Department into court to fight against school desegregation orders, has "made it clear that it is the fashion now to be subtly antiblack." The Administration would deny that vehemently, of course, but it has never articulated a philosophy for helping blacks, beyond its inadequate efforts to foster black capitalism and its much-vaunted plan for welfare reform, which it has now unceremoniously scrapped.

What especially worries many experts, black and white, is the growing schism between those blacks who are catching up and those who are falling behind. The latest census figures point up their belief that while an increasing, if still too small, proportion of black youngsters are going to college, landing good jobs, and gaining equality with whites, many others have given up hope of ever joining the labor force. Those left behind may, as Moynihan warned last year, solidify into a "20th century equivalent of 'the dangerous classes,' " bereft of hope and perpetually tempted to violence. Should this occur, Black America would have been split into two societies--separate and unequal.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.