The Washington Post warned, in a story headlined, “Winding Down Fannie and Freddie Could Put Minority Careers at Risk,” that 44 percent of Fannie employees and 50 percent of Freddie’s were persons of color.
[Note: This article was originally posted on December 17th, 2011. The IFNM website was attacked by hackers and many articles are now gone from the archives. As a public service, IFNM is now reposting said articles.]
“The Disappearing Black Middle Class” ran the headline over the Chicago Sun-Times story. And the statistics from the Economic Policy Institute were indeed sobering.
In 2007, best year of the Bush era, white households had a median net worth of $134,280, compared with $13,450 for black households.
By 2009, the median net worth for white households had fallen 24 percent to $97,860. For black households, it had plummeted 83 percent to $2,170, a near wipeout.
As Algernon Austin of EPI’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy put it, “In 2009, for every dollar of wealth the average white household had, black households had two cents.”
One explanation for this surely is the wave of foreclosures on subprime mortgages, a large share of which were held by African-Americans.
But while unemployment among white men has surged in the Great Recession, among black men it has hit 16 percent, the highest level since the Department of Labor began to keep records in 1972.
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