There is no doubt that the U.S. housing mortgage crisis is rooted in much deeper contradictions of present-day capitalism, a system dominated by speculative money-movers who create nothing, but have harnessed the powers of the state to keep churning out profits. The entire, global edifice would collapse were it not for the coercive power of the United States military to subjugate whole regions of the planet—to rig the game. Domestically, the money-changers are insulated by the state from the consequences of their wanton thievery. The captains of capital will be bailed out, rescued from bankruptcy—to the extent possible—to steal again.

There is another bankruptcy that has been dramatically revealed by the sub-prime mortgage catastrophe: the bankruptcy of a Black politics that is based on the trappings and illusions of steady African American upward mobility, despite the objective facts of massive racial wealth disparity. This central defect in an ancient current in African American thinking holds that the appearance of prosperity trumps reality; that Black folks will surely climb up the social and economic ladder if only they look the part, even if their actual economic status is a façade.

Predatory lenders of the store-front kind have always profited from an exaggerated "display" imperative among African Americans. With wholesale deregulation of the finance industry, especially during Bill Clinton's presidency, the big boys jumped into the loan shark game with all four feet, steering Blacks into high-interest mortgages at a rate far-disproportionate to the home-buying public. Whole neighborhoods, many of them outwardly prosperous—with the appearance of being solidly middle and upper middle class—spread through the formerly white suburbs, creating the illusion of some sea-change in Black economic fortunes. Black suburbia was heralded as proof that the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow could be overcome without inconvenience to white privilege.

No matter that Black household wealth is no more than one-sixth that of the median white household—and that it would take centuries to catch up at the current pace, that is, the pace before the latest crisis. A section of so-called Black leadership hailed the new suburban settlements as prima facie evidence of soaring Black mobility. As gentrification pushed growing numbers of Black households out of cities and into ghettoizing suburbs, that too was viewed as, somehow, a sign of "progress." We as a people were moving on up - and out. But we now know that a great chunk of this mobility was not vertical, but a horizontal journey into the shifting sands of sub-prime lending. Consider this: Prince George's County, a Washington DC suburb, is the most affluent majority-Black county in the nation. It now registers the highest home-foreclosure rate of any county in the state of Maryland.

The trappings of wealth—purchased with a signature—do not represent Black progress, much less power. Those Black politicians that have encouraged so many of our people to buy into a culture of ostentatious display, rather than the hard work of political struggle, have done their most committed followers the gravest disservice.

Black Liberation will not be financed on credit.

Glen Ford Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com

Source: BlackAgendaReport

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posted 14 November 2007