COMMUNITY LIVIN’ ON PURPOSE: UNCOMFORTABLE POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC REALITIES by Dr. Eric Johnson W.E.B. DuBois, a noted sociologist, civil rights activist, and scholar once famously said, “A system cannot fail those who it was never meant to protect”. The prophecy of those words is both uncomfortable and illuminating. Uncomfortable in the sense that factors such as race, class, ethnicity, and gender still have an enormous impact on the lived experiences of too many people. Illuminating in the sense that the words themselves are in many ways instructive. They not only identify inequality, but they also plainly provide an explanation. In other words, the bottom and top of a social, economic, and political system is not and never has been solely determined by the deeds of the people in question. Moreover, the bottom of the economic rung has traditionally been overpopulated by racial and ethnic minorities and that trend continues today. Systematic outcomes become far more predicable when we examine who mostly benefits and who is mostly harmed. This examination oftentimes comes down to one question: How are the people at the top social structure affected compared to the folks at the bottom? The outcome of that question makes many people uncomfortable but when it is applied to systemic effects it forthrightly reveals who was meant to be protected and who was not. Current political and economic trends unfortunately serve as evidence for the systemic analysis provided by the Dr. DuBois. While the President and many of his supporters tout an economic boom, it is not shared evenly across the American public. Black unemployment during the Trump presidency has consistently doubled the rates in the White community. Furthermore, there continues to be disparities in wages between the Black and White communities. Black unemployment over the last year has actually been on the rise, while it appears to be 6.8 percent currently, it has been as high as 7 percent in 2018 more than doubling the rates in the White community. Wage disparities for the year 2018 were pervasive at every level of wage distribution. In 2018 White people who had high school diplomas earned 21% on average more than Black folks with the same qualifications. July 2019 The URBAN EXPERIENCE 21
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