Our divided society - 50 years of the failure of reformism

Barriers to equality pose threats to democracy in the U.S. as the country remains segregated along racial lines and child poverty worsens. A new report  blames U.S. policymakers and elected officials, saying they’re not doing enough to heed the warning on deepening poverty and inequality as highlighted by the Kerner Commission a half-century ago, and it lists a number of areas where the country has seen “a lack of or reversal of progress.” People of color and those struggling with poverty are confined to poor areas with inadequate housing, underfunded schools and law enforcement that views those residents with suspicion

“Racial and ethnic inequality is growing worse. We’re resegregating our housing and schools again,” former U.S. Sen. Fred Harris of Oklahoma, a co-editor of the new report and last surviving member of the original Kerner Commission created by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967. “There are few more people who are poor now than was true 50 years ago. Inequality of income is worse.”

The percentage of people living in deep poverty — less than half of the federal poverty level — has increased since 1975. About 46 percent of people living in poverty in 2016 were classified as living in deep poverty — 16 percentage points higher than in 1975.

 The homeownership gap has widened for African-Americans, the report found. Three decades after the Fair Housing Act of 1968 passed, black homeownership rose by almost 6 percentage points. But those gains were wiped out from 2000 to 2015 when black homeownership fell 6 percentage points, the report says.

 Gains to end school segregation were reversed because of a lack of court oversight and housing discrimination. The court oversight allowed school districts to move away from desegregation plans and housing discrimination forced black and Latino families to move into largely minority neighborhoods. In 1988, for example, about 44 percent of black students went to majority-white schools nationally. Only 20 percent of black students do so today, the report says.

• 22.8 percent of black Americans aged 25 to 29 are college graduates, in comparison to 42.1 percent of white Americans.
• 21.8 percent: That's the poverty rate among black Americans. While the gap between black and white poverty rates has narrowed since the 1960s—when the black poverty rate sat at 34.7 percent, in comparison to 10 percent for white Americans—the black poverty rate today is still dramatically higher than the poverty rate among white Americans, which sits at 8.8 percent. Similarly, the median household income among black Americans is still dramatically lower than among white Americans ($40,065, as compared to $65,041). The median household wealth of white Americans ($171,000) is approximately 10 times higher than that of black Americans. And, at 7.5 percent, black unemployment in 2017 was actually higher than it was in 1968. Likewise, rates of homeownership among black Americans have barely budged since 1968.
• 1,730: That's the number of black Americans, per 100,000 in the population, who are currently incarcerated. (By comparison, only 270 white Americans per 100,000 are currently incarcerated.) In America today, a black American is 6.4 times more likely to be incarcerated than a white American. Both white and black Americans have seen a dramatic increases in incarceration rates: In 1968, 604 black Americans and 111 white Americans (both numbers are per 100,000) were incarcerated.
• 11.4: That's the infant mortality rate, per 1,000 live births, for black infants. This is over twice as high as the infant mortality rate of 4.9 for white infants. Similarly, life expectancy for black Americans (75.5 years) is still almost four years shorter than that of white Americans (79 years).