Clutching pearls for the poor black folks

I am often astounded at the "concern" many (mostly white) progressives feign over how those poor black folks are being hurt by President Obama. Here's an example (sorry, not going to link):

The Black unemployment rate is twice that of whites. And for young black men it's even worse.

So, what has/is Obama doing for your community on that real world economic hardship?

Of course, that is just one example. You hear it all the time. And it always reminds me of an experience I had not too long ago.

At the non-profit where I work, we invited our program managers (all African Americans) into a board meeting in late 2008 to talk about their work with clients (almost exclusively low income and predominantly African American). One of the board members asked how the economic crisis was affecting our clients. The managers thought for a moment and then said that they didn't see any real change. These people had been living in poverty - many for generations - with high unemployment and lack of access to education as well as opportunities.

What was clear from that meeting was that all of the sudden middle class and white people were starting to experience what poor minority folks had for a long time.

So you have to ask, "Where has this concern about black people been all these years?" Are they just noticing that black unemployment HAS ALWAYS BEEN twice that of whites? But now, all of the sudden, its the African American President's fault?

If white progressives took just a moment to talk to their African American brothers and sisters, they might learn some things that would surprise them. Like support for President Obama is 85% in the African American community. But even more interesting is what Ellis Cose recently summarized in an article titled Meet the New Optimists.

As the United States struggles through its worst economic crisis in generations, gloom has seized much of the heartland. The optimism that came so easily to many Americans as the new century dawned is significantly harder to summon these days. There is, however, a conspicuous exception: African-Americans, long accustomed to frustration in their pursuit of opportunity and respect, are amazingly upbeat, consistently astounding pollsters with their hopefulness. Earlier this year, when a Washington Post–Kaiser–-Harvard poll asked respondents whether they expected their children’s standard of living to be better or worse than their own, 60 percent of blacks chose “better,” compared with only 36 percent of whites.

Numerous previous polls found the same cheerful confidence. On the eve of President Barack Obama’s inauguration, 69 percent of black respondents told CNN pollsters that Martin Luther King’s vision had been “fulfilled.” Nearly two years later, as America prepared for the 2010 midterm elections, blacks shared little of the disenchantment that had overtaken many whites. African-Americans were more likely than whites to say that the economy was sound, found CBS News. And nearly half (compared with 16 percent of whites) thought America’s next generation would be better off.

Over the past few years, pollsters repeatedly have corroborated the phenomenon. Whereas whites are glum, blacks are upbeat—which is remarkable since the economic crisis has hit African-Americans with particularly brutal force. Employment among black men, for instance, has dropped to an all-time low. When I asked Harvard Business School professor David Thomas about the CNN poll, he laughed. “It’s irrational exuberance,” he said.

Certainly, the Obama presidency has fueled euphoria in black circles. But even before Obama came on the scene, optimism was building—most notably among a new generation of black achievers who refused to believe they would be stymied by the bigotry that bedeviled their parents. Obama’s election was, in effect, the final revelation—the long-awaited sign that a new American age had arrived. “It blows away the nationalist argument that the system is white and racist and won’t ever change,” scholar Manning Marable told me shortly before his death.

I'm going to call it a great example of white privilege for progressives to assume that they have all of the sudden developed a deep concern about the plight of African Americans in this country. That's because, as Cose points out, its mostly based on ignorance of the actual perceptions of black people - something that is the heart of white privilege.