It’s been five years since the housing bubble burst causing outright hysteria on Wall Street and hopelessness on Main street.
Although the great recession supposedly ended more than three years ago resulting in massive stock gains for Whites, in Black communities, 18 years of economic progress has vanished and has yet to rebound. In fact, things seem to be getting progressively worse.
Between 2007 and 2010, Black families saw their wealth fall by 31 percent, according to an April 2013 report by the Urban Institute. As scholars at the Economic Policy Institute wrote in a 2012 book on working America, “African Americans have essentially been living through a perpetual, slow-moving recession.”
Here are the ways that Blacks have been affected, or rather not affected, by general economic recovery:
