Starting with La Griffe du Lion's analysis (The Robin Hood Effect) based on ADS 1997 data, I made a fast (חפיף) comparison with the ADS latest data. According to La Griffe, in 1997 Black Americans were located by income as follows:
Lowest Quintile 25%
Second Quintile 25.8%
Middle quintile 21.1
Fourth quintile 17.1
Upper Quintile 11.0%
What happened in the last decade? While in 1997 a quarter of the Blacks were in the lowest income quintile, which I call the underclass, the lumpen, in 2007, 26% (statistically the same proportion) were still in the same place. The relative number of these Blacks, who hardly work and have bad habits, was not reduced in this decade. But if in 1997 25.8% were in the second quintile, in 2007 only 16.6% stayed there. More than a third of the working poor Black population moved up to the next or even higher quintile. In this sense, ten years of social and affirmative action programs had a revolutionary impact on the Black working class. The emphasis is on "working". We are talking of large masses of people, it was a class revolution in the Marxian sense.
But as La Griffe observed, affirmative action does not come free. Who paid the price? Basically it was the White working poor class. About fifteen percent of the middle class White workers were displaced by the blacks and sunk to the lower class (second quintile). Give or take, ten to twenty million White Americans who till 1997 lived a comfortable life and paid their mortgages and credit card debts, by 2007 they had lost their handhold in the middle class. From my home in Kever Benjamin settlement in the Shomron, I visualize this process as a Chicago foreman working in the meat packing factory, lost his job when the plant was fined by the EPA and moved most of operations to Mexico, survives on odd jobs, drinks a lot. The neighborhood has degraded, he cannot move out, is not paying his debts, daughter dropped out of high school, son in the Army, another son in and out of jail. White Americans may perform poorly in SAT exams but our man knows perfectly well what happened to him and who benefited with his loss. It was that Black man hired with a good salary as driver of the Executive Director of the Office for Community Affairs of the University of Chicago Hospitals, when it was created in 2005.
2 comments:
I know this is meant to be symbolic, but the last of the Chicago meat packing plants left the city in the early Seventies. Over the years they moved to various locations in smaller midwest cities and rural areas. For a while they were still unionized and then the unions were busted and the workforce replaced by illegal aliens.
To the extent that a white working class still exists in a place like Chicago it consists almost entirely of either govt workers or a lumpenized, wiggerized element.
The economic war against the white working class has three elements: relentless and now
rapidly expanding deindustrialization, illegal immigration and AA.The last seems to be the least important.
I stand corrected. Having known what the Chicago meat packing industry was, it is difficult for this old man to visualize its COMPLETE destruction. See my correction above
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