Minorities Also Struggling Under Obama

In Barack Obama’s first year as president, African-Americans and Latinos have struggled to bridge a wide equality gap with whites, in particular in the area of jobs, a report said Wednesday.

In its annual “State of Black America” report released Wednesday, the centennial organization said African Americans lagged in homeownership rates and were almost twice as likely to be unemployed and lack health insurance.

The 151-page study, which in 2007 featured a foreword by then-Sen. Obama bemoaning the problems facing black men, makes clear that it appreciates his efforts so far as president but that much more must be done.

“These are tough times in America and they require a powerful and immediate response,” said Marc Morial, president and CEO of the civil rights group.

Blacks were more than twice as likely to be out of a job than whites from 1972 to 2009, and the rate has fallen only slightly since Obama took office with blacks now 1.8 times more likely to be unemployed, the report said.

For the first time this year, Hispanics got their own Equality Index using the social standing of whites as a baseline.

It showed that while they still lag behind, with an overall Equality Index of 75.5 percent against whites, they are faring better than blacks, whose overall Equality Index was 71.8 percent.

But in some areas, such as health care, Hispanics are far behind blacks, who themselves trail whites.

Nearly one in three Hispanics are without health care coverage, compared to one in five blacks, 19.1 percent, and around 11 percent of whites, the report said.

Whites are more than one and a half times as likely as blacks and more than twice as likely as Hispanics to have a university degree, it said.

“Education matters more than ever, those with a bachelor´s degree fared much better than high school dropouts in the recession,” the report said.

“Education is the true path out of poverty, education is the civil rights issue of our time. The average black child is two or three grade levels behind the average white child, about half of black students fail to graduate on time and only one in five blacks has a bachelor´s degree,” it said.

In terms of home ownership, less than half of black and Hispanic families owned their own home, compared to three-quarters of white families who are homeowners.

And blacks and Hispanics were both three times more likely than whites to live below the poverty line.

Another glaring inequity was the huge differences between the incarceration rates of blacks, Hispanics and whites.

Blacks are six times more likely and Hispanics are three times more likely than whites to be incarcerated, the report said.

The only area in which African Americans made strides was in the area of civic engagement, and that was largely due to the huge turnout of black voters in the 2008 presidential elections that put the first African American president in the White House.

Among its findings, the report indicated a huge difference in 2009 real median household income between whites and minorities. The real median income was $34,218 for blacks, $37,913 for Hispanics and $55,530 for whites.

The Americano/Agencies

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