Exacerbating Inequality

By GENE NICHOL

It doesn’t happen as often as one might wish. But, on occasion, you can still be surprised by what someone says. For example, in November, the Donald Trump-appointed Chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, explained to the Senate Banking, Committee:

“Disparate economic outcomes on the basis of race, have been with us for a very long time, they are a long-standing aspect of our economy, and there is a great risk that the pandemic is making them worse. Because the people who are most affected by the job losses are people in relatively low-paying parts of the service industries that happen to skew more to minorities and women, there is a real concern that if we don’t act as quickly as possible to support these people, then we’ll leave behind an even more unequal situation. We need to do as much as we can to avoid exacerbating inequality.”

Seriously, the guy Bloomberg news calls “Wall Street’s Head of State” lectured the country on the challenges of economic justice. Man.

The traditional patterns of racial economic subordination Powell referenced have long dominated every component of life in North Carolina. Today, for example, twice as many African-American Tar Heels live in poverty as whites. The numbers are even worse for black kids – nearly three times as many are poor as whites. Racial income disparity is huge. But racial wealth disparity astonishes. Black households, on average, claim less than a tenth of the economic assets of white Tar Heel families. Racial minorities are dramatically more likely, in North Carolina, to be unemployed, uninsured, food insecure, housing insecure, and trapped in low wage work. Such defining disparities have existed throughout the entirety of our state’s history. Radical, systemic, disproportional racial economic impact, as Chairman Powell put it, has “been with us for a very long time.”

And then came the tragic, terrifying pandemic. Hundreds of thousands of Tar Heels were cast, anew, into poverty. No Kid Hungry estimates that, this year, one in four Tar Heel children won’t be able to get enough to eat. State food pantries report a 38% increase in demand over recent months. Since March, over half of NC black families, and 43% of Latinx households, lost significant employment income sources. Over a third of Latinx renters have been forced to miss monthly payments, jeopardizing their housing. Eighteen percent of all NC adults aged 18-65 are now without any health care coverage whatsoever. Nearly 40 percent of NC Latinos have no medical insurance. As Fed Chair Powell put it, COVID “will leave behind an even greater” landscape of inequality.

There is much irony here – from varied directions. Over the last decade, North Carolina has produced one of the nation’s most brutal anti-poverty-relief programs. Restrictions on health care, unemployment compensation, earned income tax credits, food stamps, legal services, child care and subsistence welfare have been implemented in the purported belief that poor Tar Heels are unworthy. They are, it is said, lazy, unwilling to work, without ambition or discipline. They seek to live on the generosity of others. Not here.

Post COVID, oddly, we have largely doubled-down on these cruel and wounding policy frameworks. We’ve clung to our path even though I’ve yet to meet a single Tar Heel who thinks that we’ve faced traumas of health, employment, recession and hunger in 2020, because our sisters and brothers have become, suddenly, unwilling to work or to fend for themselves. Even when our bias is irrefutably and demonstrably disproven, we hold fast. We adhere. We treat inequality like it is our religion.

Gene Nichol is Boyd Tinsley Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law and in 2015 started the North Carolina Poverty Research Fund after the UNC Board of Governors closed the state-funded Poverty Center for publishing articles critical of the governor and General Assembly.

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2021

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