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Mortgage Crisis
Lesson: Ostentatious Display Ain't
Black Power
By
Glen Ford
A Black Agenda Radio Commentary
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 |