Placeholder when loading item promotions
There’s a saying in my community that if America gets a cold, black people get pneumonia. The brutal economic fallout of the pandemic for black Americans confirms this expression.
When there is an economic downturn like this, with rising inflation and dwindling purchasing power, black people are hit harder and take longer to recover. A Washington Post-Ipsos poll of more than 1,200 black Americans this spring finds some things never change.
Nearly 8 in 10 Black Americans say gas affordability is “not so good” or “bad” (79 percent) in their community, with a large majority saying the same for affordability of housing (75 percent) and food (66 percent). percent) says. . While others may share concerns about rising prices, historical data shows that black households may have greater difficulty withstanding such cost pressures.
This piece of housing is personally important to me. My daughter, who has a degree in Early Childhood Education and Special Education, has just accepted a job as a teacher at an elementary school in Baltimore. I help her find housing in mostly black neighborhoods near her school.
From her starting salary as a teacher, she has to spend half of her monthly net salary to be able to afford a decent rent without a roommate.
“Mom, I don’t want to live paycheck to paycheck,” she said when we searched for apartments online.
Living at home means she has a long commute to work, but it’s starting to look like her most economical solution. She has luck. Not everyone has the same option.
Many Americans of all races and ethnicities suffer. Rising inflation limits their ability to build a financial cushion. It’s hard to save for the inevitable financial hardship when such a high percentage of your net income goes to housing, gas, and groceries.
But as hard as it is for so many, blacks face even tougher times because of wage and employment disparities. A Pew Research Center survey of black Americans conducted last fall found that just over a third of black adults have an emergency fund, compared to over half of adults overall.
“The longstanding differences in economic experiences among black Americans persist today,” wrote Khadijah Edwards, a Pew research associate who focuses on race and ethnicity research.
When people say just look for better grocery prices, it’s not always possible. Black neighborhoods have fewer large supermarkets and often live in “food deserts”.
Black Americans are also disproportionately affected by food insecurity, according to US Department of Agriculture data. The USDA says food-insecure households are insecure or unable to get enough food to meet their entire family’s needs because they don’t have enough money or other resources.
The USDA found that 22 percent of black households were food insecure in 2020, compared to 11 percent of all US households.
In the Post-Ipsos survey, about one in three Black Americans (32 percent) said recent price increases have been a “major financial drain” on their households. This view is very similar to that of the general public.
Confidence in the economy is low among black households. The poll found that 25 percent of black Americans rate the economy as excellent or good, compared with 42 percent in early 2020.
The post-Ipsos survey was conducted through the Ipsos KnowledgePanel from April 21 to May 2 among a randomized national sample of 1,248 non-Hispanic Black adults with a partially overlapping sample of 997 US adults. The results among Black Americans and All Americans have a sampling error margin of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
None of these poll results surprised me. Black Americans’ struggles have only been exacerbated by the pandemic.
“From Reconstruction to Jim Crow to today, our economy has worked fairly for black Americans or really no black American,” Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said earlier this year in a remark at the annual Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. tribute held from the National Action Network, a civil rights organization.
All business news for black Americans isn’t bad.
Sixty-one percent of Black Americans rate job availability in their community as excellent or good in the Post-Ipsos survey, although a larger majority of the general public rated job availability positively (72 percent).
A quarter of Black Americans say their financial situation has improved in recent years, while 22 percent say it has gotten worse and 52 percent say it has stayed the same. These views are slightly more positive than the general public – 18 percent say their situation is improving, 30 percent worse.
Why is all this important?
The economic fallout from the pandemic has left many Americans economically vulnerable, but black households even more so. Before Covid, the typical white family was eight times wealthier than the typical black family, according to the 2019 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances.
In 2021, 40 percent of black adults in a separate Fed poll said they were having or about to have trouble paying bills, about twice as many white adults who said the same (19 percent).
More than two years into the pandemic, and as fears of a recession mount, I worry that systemic problems that have already outpaced so many black households will not improve even as the economy recovers.
Emily Guskin and Scott Clement contributed to this column.
Comments are closed.