The Black Depression

The New York times ran an op-ed piece on Saturday written by Barbra Ehrencreich and Dedrick Muhammad on the current recession is effecting people differently based on race (well just Black and White)

I titled this post The Black Depression because of this bit of the article.

In fact, you could say that for African-Americans the recession is over. It occurred from 2000 to 2007, as black employment decreased by 2.4 percent and incomes declined by 2.9 percent. During those seven years, one-third of black children lived in poverty, and black unemployment — even among college graduates — consistently ran at about twice the level of white unemployment.

That was the black recession. What’s happening now is more like a depression.

something I found interesting was this bit about how the Black Church became part of the problem we are all in due to the recession as well as showing a bit of racism from the people at Wells Fargo.

At Wells Fargo, Elizabeth Jacobson, a former loan officer at the company, recently revealed — in an affidavit in a lawsuit by the City of Baltimore — that salesmen were encouraged to try to persuade black preachers to hold “wealth-building seminars” in their churches. For every loan that resulted from these seminars, whether to buy a new home or refinance one, Wells Fargo promised to donate $350 to the customer’s favorite charity, usually the church. (Wells Fargo denied any effort to market subprime loans specifically to blacks.) Another former loan officer, Tony Paschal, reported that at the same time cynicism was rampant within Wells Fargo, with some employees referring to subprimes as “ghetto loans” and to minority customers as “mud people.

but I think this line about the fact that really the reason this recession is effecting African Americans worst is...

If any cultural factor predisposed blacks to fall for risky loans, it was one widely shared with whites — a penchant for “positive thinking” and unwarranted optimism,

the problem as pointed in the article was that we all maybe be overly optimistic but African Americans have had a history of being discriminated from in the banking and mortgage sector for a long time and it still continues today but instead of being denied a loan they get improved for one under worst terms then others get.