Blacks' economic gains wiped out in downturn

MSNBC ^ | 7/10/2011 | JESSE WASHINGTON/ap

[tobyhill]

Growing up black in the segregated 1960s, Deborah Goldring slept two to a bed, got evicted from apartment after apartment, and watched her stepfather climb utility poles to turn their disconnected lights back on. Yet Goldring pulled herself out of poverty and earned a middle-class life — until the Great Recession.

First, Goldring's husband fell ill, and they drained savings to pay for nursing homes before he died. Then Goldring lost her executive assistant job in the Baltimore hospital where she had worked for 17 years. The cruelest blow was a letter from the bank, intending to foreclose on her home of almost three decades.

Millions of Americans endured similar financial calamities in the recession. But for Goldring and many others in the black community, where unemployment is still rising, job loss has knocked them out of the middle class and back into poverty. Some even see a historic reversal of hard-won economic gains that took black people decades to achieve.

Goldring remembers her mother taping the blinds to the wall so no one could see them stealing electricity. She remembers each time she sat on the curb with her three brothers, surrounded by her family's belongings, waiting for a new place to live. Sitting on those curbs, she promised to always pay her bills on time.

[Venturer]

In the case of blacks their Grandchildren are not being shot by a firing squad, they are being sucked out of the womb at abortion clinics by the thousand's——and they don't seem to mind.

[nascarnation]

30 years in a house, yet it gets foreclosed?

I'm betting evil Republican bankers forced her to take out a series of home equity loans.

[nascarnation]

Last April, black male unemployment hit the highest rate since the government began keeping track in 1972. Only 56.9 percent of black men over age 20 were working, compared with 68.1 percent of white men.

Another new economic record for the Baraqqi Regime!

[boop]

I was trying to think what planet this writer was on. We're NOT in a recession now? GWB must have been a genius to leave the country not in recession when he LEFT in 2009.

I'm also trying to be nice about this lady, but she had her second kid at age 21? Not usually a formula for success, unless you're married to a guy who can support you. And I applaud her 17 years of working in a job, but she should have a pretty nice nest egg saved up by then, good insurance for her sick hubby while she was working, fully vested retirement, and a paid off house after 30 years (lots of equity/value even if the house has lost value).