The wealth possessed by our nation's 400 richest
billionaires is equal to the collective net worth of all African-American
households.
By Bob Lord
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| Some of the wisdom of Dr. King (from Daily Kos) |
As we commemorate
Martin Luther King Jr.’s 85th birthday, we’ve all come to know
his dream. Above all else, he dreamed that one day this nation would rise up
and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
Yet here’s the grim
reality facing black America today:
The net worth of just 400
billionaires, a group that could fit into a high school gym, is on
par with the collective wealth of our more than 14 million African- American
households. Both groups possess some $2 trillion, about three percent of our
national net worth of $77 trillion.
We chose to honor Dr.
King by making his birthday a national holiday because of his tireless work for
justice. And MLK stood not only for social justice, but for economic justice as
well.
And the “March on
Washington” was “for jobs and freedom.” At the time of his assassination in
Memphis in 1968, Dr. King was standing with striking sanitation workers in
their fight for economic justice.
How would MLK view the
Forbes 400 controlling as much wealth as our entire African-American population
of about 41 million people? Could that state of affairs co-exist with his
dream?
Hardly. At the outset
of that speech about his dream, the civil rights leader noted that one century
after the Emancipation Proclamation, “the Negro lives on a lonely island of
poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”
Dr. King’s dream was
as much about economic justice as it was about social justice. Today’s
distribution of wealth in America represents his nightmare come true — even
with Barack Obama serving as our president.
What derailed the
dream? How is it that, 50 years out from MLK’s speech, black America has such a
dismally small slice of our nation’s wealth?
Here’s how: In the
1940s through the 1960s, U.S. economic opportunity and upward mobility outside
the African-American community were the envy of the world. Back then, economic
inequality was plummeting.
While discrimination
kept black America mired in poverty, Dr. King watched tens of millions of other
Americans climb from humble beginnings to affluence. So, he justifiably
believed that if African Americans could break free from the yoke of racial
discrimination, they too could share in the American Dream.
It would take a
generation or two until most of them made it, but eventually they’d get there.
Soon after the
chokehold of racial discrimination on the advancement of blacks finally started
to loosen, however, America began its return to the society that existed before
Dr. King’s birth, where a small slice of the population lives in opulence while
average Americans struggle to get by.
Today, it’s not social
injustice, but extreme inequality that constrains economic mobility, not just
for black Americans, but all of us. America, once the land of opportunity, now
has a level of economic mobility lower than that
of almost all other rich countries.
By the time African
Americans broke mostly (but not entirely) free from racist constraints on their
economic mobility, they were whacked with a new obstacle: the almost equally
suffocating injustice of extreme inequality. They’re not the only ones
suffering. But because they were locked out of the egalitarian economic
progress that took place during Dr. King’s lifetime, they’re disproportionately
represented in the group now stuck on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.
So here we are, a
half-century after Dr. King described his dream, living through a nightmare
where 400 ultra-rich Americans control as much wealth as our entire
African-American population.
Bob Lord, a veteran
tax lawyer and former congressional candidate, practices and blogs in Phoenix,
Arizona. He is also an Institute for Policy Studies associate
fellow.
Distributed via OtherWords (OtherWords.org)
Distributed via OtherWords (OtherWords.org)