Have African Americans escaped inequality? Not even close.

By Ellis Cose, Published: July 7, 2011

The Obama presidency notwithstanding, America has not become post-racial. But it has become post-caste.

This is a colossal achievement that places us awfully close to that world imagined by Martin Luther King Jr. in which “little black boys and black girls . . . join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” For there are plenty of places in today’s America where children of various hues bond and play together, happily oblivious to the differences that might once have kept them apart.

But the realization of that dream does not mean America has reached true equality. King understood this difference, as his later anti-poverty crusade made clear. Financial fragility, he realized, could be even more crippling than segregation, especially when undergirded by a history of economic discrimination that left many blacks only marginally better off than lower caste members in India. So he died fighting to level — or at least make more even — the economic playing field.

King’s legendary “I have a dream” speech focused on ending American apartheid for one simple reason: Racism loomed so large, and its clasp was so suffocating, that for African Americans of the era, it was the great, inescapable evil, and one that made it hard to focus on much of anything else. But even as the uglier forms of racism receded with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, blacks of all classes, including those with Ivy League degrees, despaired of escaping the confines of race. It was that hopelessness festering among the black elite that led me, in the early 1990s, to write a book, “The Rage of a Privileged Class,” about African Americans frustrated by their inability to shatter the glass ceiling.

Yet, in a remarkably short time, the ceiling began to crack. Corporate chief executives, the whitest cohort in America, suddenly got some color. Richard Parsons became president of Time Warner in 1995, and in 2002, he was named chief executive. Kenneth Chenault landed the top job at American Express in 2001. Oprah Winfrey became not only one of the world’s richest women, but the arbiter of middle-American taste. Meanwhile, black actors such as Denzel Washington, Will Smith and Halle Berry ascended to the top ranks of Hollywood. Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice became secretaries of state. Then, of course, came the stunning rise of Barack Obama.

On the eve of Obama’s inauguration, a CNN poll found that two-thirds of blacks believed that King’s dream had been “fulfilled.” In a narrow sense, it had been. If Obama’s election proved nothing else, it proved that the previously impermeable American caste system was at long last dead. Dark skin could no longer bar someone from the nation’s positions of power — not even from the most powerful job in the land.

The end of caste has had a huge impact on a rising generation of black achievers, a cohort that I studied extensively for my new book, “The End of Anger.” In my research, I surveyed 200 black alumni of Harvard Business School and more than 300 alumni of A Better Chance, a New York City-based program founded in 1963 that sends minority children to selective high schools across the country.

I found a massive generation gap: Many of those under age 40 had boundless faith in their ability to crash through, navigate around or simply disregard barriers that bedeviled talented blacks of earlier generations. Their outlook struck many older black respondents as naive, yet it reflected their experience of coming up in a world where African Americans are no longer imprisoned in a subordinate caste.

But of course, the reality of these highly educated young people is not the reality of the poor and unlettered. In the less privileged America, blatant racism may be forbidden, but brutal unfairness remains a fact of life.

The percentage of black men with jobs, always lower than that for whites, has dropped to its lowest level since the Labor Department began keeping such records in the early 1970s. Even before the Great Recession, the wealth gap between blacks and whites was growing. That gap, excluding home equity, stood at $20,000 in 2007 dollars in 1984; by 2007, it had increased to $95,000, according to Brandeis University’s Institute on Assets and Social Policy. And the subprime mortgage meltdown made things much worse, hitting with particular force many communities occupied largely by blacks and Latinos. The Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit research and advocacy group, estimated that property depreciation related to foreclosures between 2009 and 2012 would end up costing black communities $194 billion and Latino communities $177 billion. The center also concluded that “nearly 8 percent of both African Americans and Latinos have lost their homes to foreclosures, compared to 4.5 percent of whites.”

How could such things happen at the very time the nation’s racial caste system was collapsing? Because the end of American apartheid did not erase the caste system’s effects. America’s history of economic discrimination left most blacks unable to accumulate the intergenerational wealth — trust funds, mortgage-free property and unencumbered cash — that would have permitted them to weather the economic storm. And residential segregation made Zip codes largely inhabited by blacks and Latinos easy to target for subprime loans.

During a visit to India a couple of years ago, I spent time with Martin Macwan, a lawyer born in a small village to Dalits, or “untouchables,” who has made the elimination of untouchability his life’s work. He has started schools for young Dalits shunned in their home villages; created programs to provide alternatives to the menial jobs normally reserved for lower castes; and fought for Dalit rights in the courts, although untouchability was outlawed by the Indian constitution in 1950. The “social system,” Macwan told me, “is more powerful than the law.”

The United States is discovering something similar. The caste system has officially ended, particularly (as in India) in cosmopolitan circles. Yet its legacy hasn’t vanished. Even though formally sanctioned racism may have effectively disappeared, racism’s effects linger.

There is no term to describe this new reality — a world where the economic system, culture and customs conspire to keep many people trapped in what seems very much like the old caste system, even as we celebrate the collapse of the caste system. Neither the old rhetoric of racism nor the new talk of post-racialism remotely captures where we are. Nor does the oft-used phrase “structural racism” really sum it up. “Structural inequality” comes closer, but even that inelegant term does not adequately describe how history and present-day hurdles to achievement come together to keep certain communities down.

Perhaps it is time to put such language aside and to recognize that the struggle for equality was never just about race. And it was certainly not just about expanding the circle of opportunity so that privileged blacks, Latinos and Asian Americans could enjoy the same prerogatives as privileged whites. It was about expanding that circle for the underprivileged, period.

Ellis Cose, formerly a columnist for Newsweek, is the author of “The End of Anger: A New Generation’s Take on Race and Rage.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/post-racial-no-post-caste-sure-post-inequality-not-even-close/2011/06/27/gIQA2QtS2H_story.html