SOURCE: AP/Gerald Herbert

Xavier University student Triton Brown studies in a common area on campus before going to one of his part-time jobs in New Orleans.

It seems as though everyone from homeowners to state and local governments are refinancing their debt. Refinancing allows the borrower to replace his or her existing debt with a new loan that has a lower interest rate and better conditions. Doing so would allow borrowers to lower their monthly payments, freeing up income for other necessities such as groceries or gas and creating a ripple effect, putting money back into the economy.

For former students, however, that is not currently an option. Student-loan debt in the United States now exceeds $1 trillion, and borrowers of color are disproportionately affected. Refinancing is just one option to address the looming student-debt crisis, but for borrowers of color it is one that could significantly ease the student-debt burden that drags on individuals and on our economy as a whole.

Students of color have higher loan debt

Today’s average college graduate holds $26,600 in debt when he or she graduates, and the numbers for borrowers of color are more severe. A 2010 study by the College Board Advocacy & Policy Center found that 27 percent of black bachelor’s degree recipients had student-loan debt of $30,500 or more, compared to just 16 percent of their white counterparts. Additionally, 69 percent of black students who did not finish their college degree cite the high cost of tuition, compared to 43 percent of their white peers.

These borrowers will be affected for years to come as they attempt to buy homes, open businesses, and begin families. The burden of student debt is one that is carried long after graduation, forcing borrowers to delay homeownership and retirement savings in order to pay off their loans. Since fewer workers now have access to traditional pensions, maintaining long-term savings is crucial to a secure retirement for many Americans.

The option to refinance can especially help Latinos, who continue to face an achievement gap. In 2011 only 13.2 percent of all U.S. Latinos over the age of 25 had bachelor’s degrees, compared to 31.8 percent of their white peers. A 2009 Pew Hispanic Center survey found that the most common reason for this gap was pressure to support their families financially, which forces many Latinos to choose between attending college and caring for their families. Low-interest-rate loans would therefore help open doors for Latinos to be able to go to college without having to make that difficult choice.

According to our calculation, refinancing student loans would save borrowers roughly $14 billion in 2013 alone, creating a boost of about $21 billion for the nation’s economy. For borrowers of color who face higher interest rates from private loans, refinancing is a vital option to reducing their student debt. If a student with $30,000 of student-loan debt, for example, were allowed to refinance his or her loan and reduce the interest rate on it from 6.8 percent to 3 percent for repayment over 10 years, he or she could save $6,667.05 in interest payments over the life of the loan.

The burden of student debt on borrowers of color puts communities of color at a disadvantage when compared to their white peers and exacerbates pre-existing socioeconomic inequalities.

The burden of debt on borrowers of color

About 20 million Americans attend college each year, and about 60 percent use loans to help offset the costs. About 81 percent of black students borrow money, compared to 65 percent of their white peers. The impact of student debt on borrowers of color is twofold: Students of color tend to borrow more, and when they do borrow, they often face higher interest rates than their white counterparts. Coupled with lower graduation rates and higher levels of youth unemployment, borrowers of color face unique burdens.

Higher interest rates

Students of color take out private student loans at a higher rate than white students, making them more financially vulnerable to risky interest rates. Private-loan distribution trends differ by students’ race or ethnicity, meaning that students of color take out more risky unregulated private student loans. In 2008 black students had the highest private student-loan participation rate despite the fact that only four years earlier, they had a smaller percentage than both white and Latino students. Mounting levels of high interest rates on student loans leave borrowers of color struggling to make payments on time, often resulting in unforeseen fees for deferment or forbearance—processes that can prevent or delay loan payments. Though these processes may make it easier month to month for borrowers of color, they also make loans more expensive in the long term once tacked onto the increasing interest rates that may have accrued.

Enrollment in for-profit institutions

Students of color are also more likely to enroll in for-profit schools—the payments for which currently account for nearly half of student-loan defaults. For-profit colleges and universities tend to have higher tuitions, higher dropout rates, and higher occurrences of insurmountable debt for students. This puts economic and academic barriers on students of color by reducing college affordability and shifting more of the financial burden onto students and away from college institutions.

High youth unemployment rates

Youth unemployment—defined as the unemployment rate for those ages 16 to 24 years old—is higher among people of color. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in August 2012 youth unemployment was 28.6 percent for blacks and 18.5 percent for Latinos, compared to 14.9 percent for their white counterparts. Given this high youth unemployment, more young people are realizing that leaving the labor force to go to school has never been a better option. But once they graduate and are faced with significant student debt—often from predatory financial institutions offering high-interest loans to students—they are faced with a double whammy: a lot of debt and a staggering economy.

The impact of long-term debt on borrowers of color

More than 13 percent of the students whose loans came due in 2009 defaulted within three years as a result of their long-term failure to make payments. Since borrowers of color tend to take out more money at a higher interest rate to finance their college expenses and have higher rates of unemployment, it is no surprise that students of color have higher default rates as well. The long-term impact of student debt is crippling, hindering youth and inevitably preventing future generations from home ownership and a secure retirement.

Debt not only holds individuals back, it also holds back their families, communities, and the economy at large. Past-due payments on loans lead to plummeting credit ratings, lower wages, and loss of federal benefits such as tax refunds that offset loan debt. Borrowers are losing money out of their own pockets, using more of their income to pay back their student-loan debt instead of saving to buy a home or for retirement. This causes a ripple effect throughout the economy: If fewer people have money to spend throughout the greater economy, less growth will occur and industries will stagnate.

One example of this is in the housing market. First-time homebuyers are essential to the recovery of the housing market. According to the Federal Reserve, however, fewer young people are getting mortgages. Only 9 percent of 29- to 34-year-olds got a first-time mortgage from 2009 to 2011, compared to 17 percent in 2001. For those with significant student debt, the debt-to-income ratio puts homeownership out of reach.

Additionally, young people who are swimming in education-loan debt are less likely to participate in wealth building mechanisms such as 401(k)s and other retirement savings plans. Refinancing their student debt would give students of color the opportunity to save more over their lifetime, allowing them to spend more on long-term savings and leading to wealth accumulation. In fact, the wealth gap among communities of color and their white counterparts is astonishing. In 2007, the latest year for which data are available, the median wealth for married or cohabitating white non-Hispanic couples was $167,500, compared to $31,500 for blacks and $18,000 for Latinos. The numbers are bleaker for single women: White single women have a median wealth of $41,500, compared to $100 for single black women and $120 for single Latino women.

Asset and wealth building occurs over generations, providing communities with economic stability. When barriers such as significant debt hinder young people from saving and building wealth, it can have a long-term effect on their children and grandchildren. In fact, from 1999 to 2007 the Urban Institute estimates that the median net worth of black families was $18,181 and that it was $33,619 for Latino families, compared to $122,927 for whites. These gaps stem from lower asset holding over generations for communities of color.

Long-term loan debt puts entire communities at risk, especially those of color, who have historically faced higher levels of unemployment and barriers to achieving wealth over time. While programs for refinancing student debt are just one of many options to address our nation’s student-loan crisis, the need for reasonable interest rates is crucial for borrowers of color.

Sophia Kerby is a Research Assistant for Progress 2050 at the Center for American Progress.

SOURCE: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

Audience members cheer as President Barack Obama holds a campaign rally at Centreville High School in Clifton, Virginia, on Saturday, July 14, 2012.

Sherrilyn A. Ifill opined in a column posted on CNN’s website in early October of last year that she was unsure whether black voters would turn out and vote in overwhelming numbers to re-elect President Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election, but was dead certain they wouldn’t vote for his opponent, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R).

At that time, Ifill was a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and chairwoman of the U.S. Programs Board of the Open Society Foundations. She was tracking the GOP nominee’s campaign, noting that his standing with black voters hit rock bottom even as a late summer NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll revealed Gov. Romney was rebounding nationally after a strong debate performance against the president.

“But Romney’s reinvigorated campaign is unlikely to move black voters,” she wrote.

Ifill’s prognostication was correct, even if she didn’t realize at the time how right she was. Definitive proof came last week in the form of a Census Bureau report that showed black voters turned out in enormous numbers, casting a higher percentage of votes than white voters for the first time on record.

According to the Census Bureau’s figures, 66.2 percent of eligible black voters cast a ballot in 2012, compared with 64.1 percent of eligible non-Hispanic white voters. Moreover, an estimated 2 million fewer white Americans voted in the election, while about 1.8 million more blacks surged to the polls. And, as exit polls suggested, an estimated 90-plus percent of black voters chose President Obama over Gov. Romney.

I called Ifill, who has since changed jobs and is currently the president and director-counsel for the Legal Defense Fund in New York, to find out what made her so prescient. How did she figure this out well before Election Day? She demurred, saying she didn’t know any more than what any other black person would have said at the time.

“There was a determination on the part of black voters to not allow the stories about voter-repression efforts to keep them from voting,” she said. “Those concerns, the fear that someone was trying to keep black people from exercising their rights, created a historic memory for black folks and they were determined not to let that happen.”

Postelection analysis seems to support that view. Political observers say black voters turned out partly in support of President Obama, who in 2008 became the first black American elected to the White House, and partly out of outrage at the efforts to keep them from voting.

“We are accustomed to people trying to deny us things, and I think sometimes you wake the sleeping giant, and that’s what happened here,” Marvin Randolph, the NAACP’s senior vice president for political campaigns, told a reporter writing about the Census Bureau report.

Michael Blake, who ran Operation Vote—the Obama campaign’s effort to energize black and minority voters—put it more colorfully. “In 2008, we changed the guard,” he recently told The New York Times. “In 2012, we guard the change.”

In her new job, Ifill directs an army of lawyers who fight in court for civil rights and she believes there are more voting-rights cases that require defending. “This is a key time for us because we’re nonpartisan, but deeply concerned about the black vote and any efforts to suppress the black vote,” she said.

In particular, Ifill and the Legal Defense Fund are monitoring the Supreme Court as it decides whether to eliminate a key section of the Voting Rights Act—Section 5—which requires Justice Department “preclearance” of any changes to districting or voting laws in jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination.

“The Section 5 decision could be a game changer in whether black voting rights are suppressed, because the law is a key protection for minority voters,” Ifill said. “We’re watching this very, very closely.”

Just as Ifill knew before Election Day, she’s right once again. Even without knowing in advance how the Supreme Court will rule on Section 5, she’s clear about its importance to our democracy. And so should all of us. Above all else, voting is a fundamental right, and we should never waver in our efforts to defend and safeguard it for every American.

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.

SOURCE: AP/Evan Vucci

Robert Rector, author of a Heritage Foundation report on immigration amnesty, speaks during a news conference at the Heritage Foundation, Monday, May 6, 2013, in Washington.

In what might be called something of a policy-political family squabble, the Heritage Foundation crossed signals with fellow conservatives by releasing yesterday a controversial, cost-benefit study related to comprehensive immigration reform. I wish this was a joking matter, but it’s a gravely serious concern.

The newsy tidbit in the conservative think tank’s document isn’t the erroneous attempt to attach a $6.3 trillion price tag to legislation under consideration to allow a path to citizenship for some 11 million undocumented immigrants. Numerous reviewers, including an excellent takedown by The Washington Post’s editorial board, attacked that miscalculation and set the record straight.

As my ThinkProgress colleagues noted, a previous 2006 Heritage report stood in stark contradiction to the one released yesterday. In its earlier study, Heritage visiting fellows Tim Kane and Kirk A. Johnson wrote, “the argument that immigrants harm the American economy should be dismissed out of hand” and urged for a comprehensive immigration bill. “A lopsided, ideological approach that focuses exclusively on border security while ignoring migrant workers (or vice versa) is bound to fail.”

So the top-line message of the latest report isn’t focused on Heritage’s empirical shortcomings and the study’s inaccuracies, but rather that the corrections came so quickly and vehemently from fellow conservatives. It is a point that Think Progress’s Rebecca Leber highlights: “The study stands alone in a field of research that finds legal immigration to be a net plus in tax revenue, education, and higher average wages. As a result many conservatives do not buy Heritage’s findings … ”

But don’t take Leber’s or my word for it. After all, we’re on a perch across town from Heritage, and speaking for myself, I find little to cheer that comes from the other side. Rather, let the right wing speak for itself:

• Via Twitter, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) complained that the Heritage report “ignores economic benefits.”
• Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) chief of staff Cesar Conda joined the fray, also via Twitter, arguing the report failed to evaluate the economic impact of immigration reform through “dynamic scoring,” which takes into account a broader array of benefits produced by immigrant workers.
• Conservative economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, was perhaps the most prominent and outspoken of the critics. He told The Washington Post’s Jim Tankersley that the conservative think tank he leads will release its own analysis today—Tuesday—that anticipates growing tax revenues that would cut federal deficits by $2.5 trillion. “It’s very important to recognize that this is a core economic policy decision,” Holtz-Eakin told The Post. “Let’s acknowledge the value” of immigrants to the U.S. economy.

Lest anyone misunderstand, I’m not indulging here in some gleeful schadenfreude over the dissention among conservative thought leaders. Rather, there’s a frighteningly real issue at stake, one that repeatedly has emerged in our stagnant, left versus right debates over public policies.

What is the value of fact-based reality in political debates? All too often, those seeking to sway public opinion—in this case, immigration; but it could just as easily be health reform, gun control, or abortion rights—supply their own set of facts to support their beliefs.

And, in some cases, even when people are confronted with information that calls into question those “facts,” researchers have found that many people just choose to ignore inconvenient truths. In a 2010 paper titled, “When Corrections Fail: The persistence of political misperceptions,” Brendan Nyhan of the University of Michigan and Jason Reifler at Georgia State University noted a “backfire effect” tends to take place when popularly held beliefs are challenged by corrective facts. The paper documents “several instances of ‘backfire effect’ in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question,” the scholars write.

I’m pleased that conservative supporters of immigration reform recognize the value of clearing a path to citizenship, which is vital to our nation’s future. It’s rare and refreshing to hear self-criticism from within conservative circles on this issue. If only they would do that on other issues, say background checks for gun purchases.

But it’s equally frustrating to see how far a small, determined band of right-wingers is willing to go with twisted facts and illogical arguments to support wrong-headed policies. This is the most troubling part about the Heritage report. It gives a lift to willful ignorance to advance its policy objectives.

How can we know whether we’re living in the real world or some Matrix-like alternate reality, where facts as reasonable people understand them actually don’t apply? Worse, what hope is there for immigration reform—or any rational public policy—if what passes for scholarship at Heritage is challenged and yet citizens and their elected lawmakers choose to embrace a gross and calculated misunderstanding of what’s real?

Indeed, if lies and distortions prevail, then democracy can only suffer.

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.

SOURCE: AP/ Burhan Ozbilici

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks at a news conference in Ankara, Turkey. Ankara is the fifth leg of Kerry's first official overseas trip to Europe and the Middle East. Most Americans cannot pass a basic global geography test or international current events test.

My cyber-friend Eric Garland, whom I wrote about late last year, recently undertook an intriguing experiment. He eschewed U.S.-based English-language mass media for a week and replaced it with news from around the globe that was written, produced, and/or broadcast in languages that are foreign to most Americans and targeted to a public beyond our shores.

Garland, a writer who focuses on future trends, is one of the smartest people I’ve come across. He’s something of a Renaissance man: the author of three books, an in-demand orator, and a groovy bass player. He also travels the world and studies global cultures and languages, including French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Japanese.

For his American media fast, he focused on reading and watching news reports only produced in French, Spanish, and Portuguese for native consumption and concentrated in Western Europe, where many of the media outlets for those languages are based. His findings, posted last week on his eponymous blog, were as unsettling as they were brutally honest:

The United States is the only country in the world that treats other nations as completely optional. … culturally, America acts as if Other Countries are places that exist only in text books or vacation brochures. This is most acutely evident in the narrative projected by our media outlets: America remains the center of the world and Other Places are only worth describing if 1) something is on fire or 2) we have declared war on the people there. So if you live in the United States, your view of global events is myopic at best and completely distorted at worst.

That’s a damning indictment of both the American public and the sources of information that Americans consume. Sadly enough, I think he’s spot on.

It’s an old story that’s worth retelling: Most Americans can’t pass a global geography or current events test that citizens of other developed nations can recite from a dead sleep. One of the first to observe and document our lack of knowledge was scholar Martin Kreisberg, who characterized the U.S. public’s misunderstanding of international relations as “dark areas of ignorance” in his seminal 1949 article for Public Opinion and Foreign Policy.

More than a half-century later, the situation remains deficient. A study conducted in 2009 by an international team of university researchers notes that Americans still lag behind Europeans in their understanding of international events. Authors Shanto Iyengar at Stanford University, Kyu S. Hahn of the University of California at Los Angeles and Yonsei University, and Heinz Bonfadelli and Mirko Marr at the University of Zurich wrote:

In the post-cold war era, notwithstanding their massive advantages in education, Americans continue to lag behind citizens of other industrialized democracies on measures of foreign affairs information. In 1994, for example, citizens of Spain, Italy, Canada, Germany, Britain, and France were generally more likely to provide correct answers to a series of questions tapping international affairs. Using the percentage of the sample unable to provide the correct answer to a single question as the indicator of public ignorance, the United States trailed other nations by 50 percentage points: 37 percent of the American sample was classified as ignorant compared with an average of 19 percent for Italy, France, Britain, Germany, and Canada.

In 2011 Newsweek magazine reported that the European Journal of Communications asked citizens of Britain, Denmark, Finland, and the United States to answer questions on international affairs. In the results of that 2009 study, “[t]he Europeans clobbered us. Sixty-eight percent of Danes, 75 percent of Brits, and 76 percent of Finns could, for example, identify the Taliban, but only 58 percent of Americans managed to do the same—even though we’ve led the charge in Afghanistan,” Newsweek reported.

Garland’s one-man observations offer an unscientific yet insightful demonstration of why Americans are so lacking in global understanding. We could, he suggests, blame it on the news we consume:

To sum up, your choice of media very much shapes your perception of the world; my experiment reminded me that it shapes mine. This week showed me how much American media is focused on propping up authority figures, reinflating unsustainable financial bubbles, and maintaining the lowest possible cultural and intellectual standards. … If you live in the U.S. and want a global perspective, getting away from the US-American media bubble is going to require effort on your part.

That effort is precisely the reason why most Americans don’t know much about current events, aside, of course, from last week’s winner of American Idol or the plotlines of “Scandal.” But it is now a civic necessity to be an informed global citizen in an increasingly interconnected world.

The ignorance, however, isn’t limited to international news. It’s homegrown, too.

Michael Schudson, author of The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life, notes that our political system, compared to the politics in many European nations, keeps a lot of Americans in the dark. Voters have to figure out the complexities of municipal, state, and federal elections as they vote for all sorts of offices—from judges and sheriffs to school boards and from mayors to congressional leaders and the president. That’s often just too much for any citizen to fully comprehend.

“Nobody is competent to understand it all, which you realize every time you vote,” Schudson said in a 2011 interview with Newsweek. “You know you’re going to come up short, and that discourages you from learning more.”

As someone who spent the bulk of his professional life in U.S. newsrooms, I can add with authority that editors and publishers are in lockstep with consumer demands. If valued readers and viewers aren’t interested in learning more about international affairs—or even parts of their own communities—then the purveyors aren’t going to spend dwindling resources serving unwanted fare.

As Garland accurately notes, the sorry state of U.S. media and the absence of public awareness of the world is a national information-health concern.

“You wouldn’t be very healthy if your food diet was both limited in diversity and low in quality,” Garland writes. “Sadly, America’s intellectual diet is increasingly resembling its food choices—heavily processed, weighted towards a juvenile palate, providing little value for a balanced life.”

As leaders in an increasingly global world, Americans ought to be setting an example, or at least striving to set one. Instead, we’re letting ourselves fall behind. The question is, are we going to start changing up our media diet, or are we going to keep gorging on the same old nonsense.

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.

SOURCE: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP

Roland Martin arrives at the 44th Annual NAACP Image Awards at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on Friday, February 1, 2013. Martin's recent removal from CNN's lineup of contracted pundits sparked an online debate.

Michael K. Fauntroy, an associate professor of public policy at George Mason University, last week stumbled into an online debate with Roland Martin, a prominent and popular multimedia journalist, about the recent decision to remove Martin from CNN’s lineup of contracted pundits.

The exchanges between Fauntroy and Martin, both of whom are black and tilt toward progressive politics, didn’t rise to the level of the more famous debates between W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, who disagreed nearly a century ago on the strategies for black social and economic uplift. Far from it. The Fauntroy-Martin dust-up was, by comparison, an unpleasant game of the dozens played largely on Twitter that apparently left all parties involved feeling unsatisfied and defamed.

It all began following the news that CNN was dumping Martin from its lineup of contracted pundits. Martin is a popular talking head with many black viewers, partly because of his strong and unapologetic black point of view and partly because he’s one of the few black personalities to regularly appear on those shows. Martin’s fans didn’t take kindly to the news from CNN and took to web-based forums to complain. The National Association of Black Journalists reacted to the CNN decision by naming Martin its 2013 Journalist of the Year.

Fauntroy, on the other hand, found all the laurels a bit too much, and he said so on his personal blog. In a post titled “Stop Shedding Tears for Roland Martin,” Fauntroy decried the attention being heaped on Martin and other television pundits who, he contended, lack expertise in politics or government:

Let’s resist the urge to make Roland Martin out to be some wrongly aggrieved talking head. He is a marginally knowledgeable loudmouth who was more sizzle than steak. No academic training in politics and government. No significant campaign experience. No experience as a political reporter at a major media outlet; he wrote opinion pieces at CNN. He is lucky to have had his turn. So, to those who are shedding tears following the announcement of his departure from CNN: your time would be better spent applying pressure to the cable networks to put minorities on the air who actually know something about politics and government.

In a rejoinder, Martin tweeted that, “I ought to send @MKFauntroy a LONG list of the black political scientists I’ve had on @tvonetv. Sounds like he’s mad he hasn’t been on! LOL.”

Fauntroy’s comments unleashed additional Twitter bile, mostly directed at him for saying such a thing in so harsh and public a manner about a fellow black man. Someone with the Twitter handle “@EsonBlack” asked Fauntroy, “[W]hy did you feel the need 2 write an article that bashes @rolandmartin credentials? What do u really gain out of it?” Another Twitter user with the handle @Rotankwot was more direct, deriding Fauntroy as a “hater with a PhD in political science.”

Web-based spats tend to be brief flare-ups that are ridiculously ugly and leave singed feelings that can last a lifetime. For that reason—along with the fact that I know and consider both Fauntroy and Martin friends—I was initially reluctant to wade into their fouled waters. Best to let them hash it out, keypad to keypad, while I stood on the sidelines and held their coats.

But as the war of tweets continued, I realized a larger and more serious point was going unnoticed: Why can’t black folks disagree in public and keep it civil?

Of course, black folks aren’t alone in their hyperbolic debates—have you noticed the rancor in Congress lately? Still, history suggests that when black people argue amongst themselves, the court of public opinion feels the need to support one side and vilify the other. Such was the case with Du Bois and Washington. And with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X; the former famously believed ardently in nonviolence, while the latter subscribed to a “by any means necessary” philosophy.

Neither Fauntroy nor Martin is a member of the vaunted pantheon of black icons, yet they’ve set themselves up as antagonists. To be fair, Fauntroy apologized for the “gratuitous and unnecessarily harsh” personal attack on Martin, but the damage is already done. As best as I can tell, Fauntroy and Martin won’t be exchanging Christmas cards, and I certainly won’t be inviting them to the same dinner party.

That’s the tragedy of it all: Both of them are smart, strong-voiced black men who ought to command public attention. That they disagree isn’t nearly as important as the fact that they both have something to say that the other should hear and respect. The same thing applies to any of us who might overhear a conversation between the two of them—or, indeed, any two others in this country.

A healthy discussion of divergent points of view is what makes a civil society civil. The Twitter-sphere would do well to remember that.

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.

SOURCE: iStockphoto

As women’s earnings continue to become increasingly important to families, closing the gender-based wage gap is crucial to gaining access to wealth accumulation in communities of color, which are still deprived of economic security.

Endnotes and citations are available in the PDF version of this issue brief.

Today, April 9, is Equal Pay Day—the date that marks how many extra days women must work in 2013 to earn what men earned in 2012. Unfortunately, the wages of working women and particularly the wages of women of color continue to lag behind the pay of their male counterparts. Moreover, for women of color there is a double pay gap. As a group, women of color earn less than their white female peers—a reality that means they need to work longer to earn the same pay as white women and then even longer to match the earnings of white men. The gender- and race-based wage gap affects families of color with long-term consequences that hinder wealth accumulation.

Women currently make up about half of all workers in the U.S. labor force and among mothers in the labor force the majority are either breadwinners or share that responsibility with a partner. In 2010, 13.1 percent of women in the workforce were black, 4.7 percent were Asian, and 12.8 percent were Latina. What’s more, these women of color are increasingly the breadwinners in their families—53.3 percent of black households and 40.1 percent of Latino households.

This issue brief will examine our nation’s gender-based wage gap and its racial overlay. It will look specifically at the long-term implications of the wage gap on communities of color and then suggest policy recommendations to narrow and eventually eliminate the wage gap to ensure equal work earns equal pay.

The wage and income gap

The gender-based wage gap disproportionately hurts women of color who have made less than their white counterparts for decades. Women of color are more likely to work in lower-paying jobs and experience higher levels of unemployment and poverty.

Women on average earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earns for comparable work—a gender wage gap of 23 percent. Women of color suffer from an even more severe gap. According to the National Partnership for Women and Families, African American women and Latinas in the United States are paid $18,817 and $23,298 less than non-Hispanic white men yearly, respectively. That’s 64 cents and 55 cents for every dollar a man earns.

The gender gap persists for median weekly earnings as well. Women’s median weekly earnings in 2012 were $691, a marginal decline compared to 2011. Men’s median weekly earnings were $854, a marginal increase compared to 2011. Women of all major racial and ethnic groups earn less than men of the same group. The largest gap is within Asian American communities where women earn a median weekly income of $770 compared to $1,055 for Asian American men. While the wage gap between men and women is smaller within Latino and black families, their median weekly earnings are significantly lower. The weekly median earnings for Latinas are $521 compared to $592 for Latino men. For black women, their weekly earnings are $599 compared to $665 for black men. African American women’s median weekly earnings were only 68.1 percent, and Latina women’s only 59.3 percent of median weekly white men’s earnings of $854.

Nearly half of the wage gap between men and women is due to differences in occupations because women are concentrated in industries such as the care and social services sectors that historically pay less and provide fewer benefits. Another 10 percent of the gender wage gap is due to differences in work experience between men and women, which are often the result of caretaking responsibilities. Often times workers with care responsibilities, usually women, withdraw from the workforce or limit their time at work to allow them to provide needed care at home. As a consequence these caretakers earn less income in the short run, are less likely to earn raises and promotions, have less access to workplace retirement benefits, earn less in Social Security retirement benefits, and accumulate lower lifetime earnings.

Yet even when controlling for occupational differences, experience, and education level, economists cannot explain the remaining 40 percent of the wage gap between men and women. Certainly part of the gender gap is due to the fact that the American workplace and institutions, such as schools and churches, never adjusted to support working families. A lack of flexible structures for working families forces them to make tough decisions. Schools that do not offer early drop-off or late pick-up options to parents, for example, force families to decide between being missing work or paying for child care. For low-income families, such decisions could mean losing a job.

Long-term implications of the wage gap

Lower income for all women, particularly those of color, means less money to support their families with necessities such as housing, food, education, and health care. Closing the pay gap is even more important for women of color who are more likely than their white counterparts to be breadwinners.

The long-term wage gap hurts families of color tremendously, forcing families to choose between putting food on the table or saving for a college education and retirement. On average, an African American woman working full time loses the equivalent of 118 weeks of food each year due to the wage gap. A Latina loses 154 weeks’ worth of food. The stubbornly persistent gender-based wage gap adds up substantially over the lifetime of a woman’s career. For women of color the loss of savings over a 30-hour-a-week to a 40-hour-a-week work lifespan is significant. A woman of color will have to live on one-third to 45 percent less than a white man based on the average benefits that are afforded through Social Security and pension plans. Research shows that a woman’s average lifetime earnings are more than $434,000 less than a comparable male counterpart over a 35-year working life.

Analysis done in 2012 by the Center for American Progress illustrates that the money lost over the course of a working woman’s lifetime could do one of the following:

• Feed a family of four for 37 years
• Pay for seven four-year degrees at a public university
• Buy two homes
• Purchase 14 new cars
• Simply be saved for retirement and used to boost her quality of life when she leaves the workforce

Lifetime earnings are even lower for women of color because they face higher levels of unemployment and poverty rates. In March 2013 unemployment rates of black and Latina women were significantly higher than their white counterparts at 12.2 percent and 9.3 percent respectively compared to white women at 6.1 percent. According to the National Women’s Law Center, poverty rates among women, particularly women of color, remain historically high and unchanged in the last year. The poverty rate among women was 14.6 percent in 2011—the highest in the last 18 years. For black and Latina women that same year, the poverty rate was 25.9 percent and 23.9 percent, respectively.

Pay gap among Millennials

Furthermore, the gender wage gap often starts right out of college. The American Association of University Women reports that women are less likely than men to be fully employed in their first year out of college. When they do have a steady job, women earn less, adding to the burden of student loan debt. In fact, Millennial women—those born between 1978 and 2000—are paid 82 cents for every dollar paid to their male peers, and young women contribute a larger portion of their salaries to repaying student loans.  In 2009, 47 percent of young women were paying more than 8 percent of their income toward student loan debt one year after graduation. For Millennial men, only 39 percent were contributing more than 8 percent of their income to paying off their student debt.

These income disparities so early in a woman’s career create financial barriers that prevent women from obtaining the same types of economic advantages that are available to their male counterparts such as purchasing a house or saving for retirement. Women are losing out financially from their very first paycheck. Even when controlling for factors such as the type of degree earned, type of occupation right out of college, and hours worked in that job, researchers found a significant pay discrepancy across the board between Millennial women and men.

Millennial women of color are particularly impacted by the wage gap starting right out of college. Even while more women than men of color are graduating from college, the impact of student loans exacerbates the gender-based wage gap. From 2009 to 2010 black females earned 68 percent of associate’s degrees and 66 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded to African American students. Hispanic females earned 62 percent of associate’s degrees and 61 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded to Hispanic students. Since women of color are more likely to attend college within their communities, the amount of student debt that young students of color take out disproportionately impacts them. In the 2007-08 academic year, 81 percent of African Americans and 67 percent of Latinos with a bachelor’s degree graduated with student debt compared to 64 percent of their white peers. Although women of color are making progress in closing the achievement gap within their racial and ethnic groups, the impact of student debt on the wage gap right out of college puts women of color in a vulnerable state.

Barriers to wealth accumulation

Pay discrepancy often hinders wealth accumulation and creates barriers to moving into the middle class. Such income disparities translate into wealth gaps that fall particularly heavily on those living at the intersection of gender and race. Lower earnings mean fewer opportunities to participate in wealth-building mechanisms such as investments in stocks and bonds and pension plans. Access to these opportunities is often unavailable in low-paying jobs that are predominantly held by women of color. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, black and Latino women were significantly more likely than their white counterparts to be among the working poor—those who are employed whose incomes fall below the federal poverty line. The working-poor rates for black and Latino women in 2011 were 14.5 percent and 13.8 percent respectively compared to white women who had a working-poor rate of 6.6 percent.

Closing the wage gap is crucial for women of color. The racial wealth differences in the United States are consequences of disparities occurring over a lifetime and result in a median wealth of only $5 for women of color between the ages of 35 to 49—virtually no wealth at all. Conversely, white women in that age cohort have a median wealth of $42,600, and white men in that age group enjoy a median wealth of $70,030. While earnings are important in accumulating wealth, other factors play a significant role in building wealth including paid sick leave, health insurance, pensions, and 401(k) plans. Over time the lack of equitable pay prevents women of color from taking advantage of wealth-building resources that act as a buffer to potential financial setbacks such as a health emergency, a death in the family, or temporary unemployment.

As women’s earnings continue to become increasingly important to families, closing the gender-based wage gap is crucial to gaining access to wealth accumulation in communities of color, which are still deprived of economic security. 

Impact on immigrant women 

Immigrant women face specific economic barriers that make them the least economically secure population in the United States and puts them at a unique disadvantage. These barriers include the realities of having language and cultural barriers, the complexity of their immigration status, the responsibility of caring for extended family members, working in low-paying jobs, and lacking eligibility for many public benefit programs.

There are approximately 4 million undocumented immigrant women living and working in the United States, but because of their immigration status, they work the lowest-paying jobs in the country. Undocumented immigrant women typically earn minimum wage or less, get no sick leave or vacation days, and receive no health insurance. Undocumented immigrant Mexican women face hourly wage disparity of 71 cents. Pay equity is often a lifeline for immigrant women since many are mothers and are most likely to support family members in their home countries.

Immigrant women, especially those who are undocumented, are especially susceptible to abuse in the workplace as they work in low-paying jobs with no benefits and have little access to public-benefit programs. Since immigrant women predominantly work in the domestic workforce, they face a host of barriers to achieving pay equity in the workforce.

Immigrants comprise 46 percent of the domestic workforce and almost the entire population of domestic workers in major cities such as New York. A study by Domestic Workers United found that 33 percent of domestic workers in New York City experienced some form of physical or verbal abuse, often because of their race or immigration status. Under these conditions immigrant women struggle to achieve pay equity against the numerous barriers put up against them such as language and cultural barriers, immigration status, and concentration in low-income jobs with limited benefits.

Impact on lesbian women of color 

Lesbian women of color struggle even more with issues of pay inequity, high poverty, unemployment rates, and discrimination. Working gay and transgender people of color still earn less than their heterosexual and white gay and transgender counterparts, but lesbian women of color struggle even more severely. The average Latina lesbian couple earns $3,000 less than Latino opposite-sex couples. Black lesbian couples face an even greater economic disparity earning $10,000 less than black same-sex male couples. Black same-sex couples significantly lag behind white same-sex couples with median incomes of $41,500 compared to $63,500.

Furthermore, lesbian couples of color experience high rates of poverty and unemployment. In 2012 the poverty rate for black lesbian couples was 21.1 percent; for Latina lesbian couples the rate, was 19.1 percent; for Native American lesbian couples, the rate was 13.7 percent; and for Asian Pacific Islander lesbian couples, it was 11.8 percent. These numbers stand in stark contrast to white lesbian couples who had poverty rates of only 4.3 percent.

Pay equity is imperative for lesbian couples of color who are more likely to have children than their white counterparts. An estimated 2 million children are being raised in gay, lesbian, and transgender families who tend to be more racially and ethnically diverse. In fact 46.7 percent of black lesbian couples and 41.5 percent of Latina lesbian couples are raising children compared to 23.1 percent of white lesbian couples. These families suffer when household incomes are unjustly decreased based on gender-, race-, and sexual orientation-wage bias.

What closing the wage gap means for families

The disparity in income adds up to more than $430,000 in lost wages for an individual woman and even more for a woman of color over her working life. This means less food on the table, less in savings for retirement and medical emergency, less money going toward a college education for their children to name just a few of the negative financial impacts. If the wage gap were closed today, a working black woman with her increased yearly pay could afford one of the following:

• Groceries for more than two years
• Mortgage and utilities payments for almost 10 months
• Rent on an apartment for more than 16 months of rent
• Health insurance premiums for more than three years
• 4,549 additional gallons of gas

Furthermore, women breadwinners are on the rise among all races and ethnicities. From 1975 to 2010 black and Latina women nearly doubled in percentage of working wives who are earning the same or more than their spouses. Among black families, 53.3 percent of women are breadwinners, up from 45.7 percent in 2007 and 28.7 percent in 1975. For Latino and white families in 2010, about 4 in 10 working wives are breadwinners—nearly double their rates from 1975.

As families continue to rely on women to contribute to household income and support their families, closing the wage gap for all women and in particular women of color is an imperative.

Policy suggestions and recommendations

The gender wage gap doesn’t just hurt women; it also hurts families. With nearly two-thirds of mothers being breadwinners or sharing the responsibilities of supporting the household, women’s paychecks are vital to families more than ever.

Below are CAP’s suggested recommendations and policy solutions to significantly reduce the pay equity gap among women of color:

• Support the Paycheck Fairness Act. Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) co-sponsored the Paycheck Fairness Act, which will require that an employer to justify paying a man more than a woman for the same job. It would also make it easier for women to file class action suits against their employers for alleged sex-based discrimination. Though the bill failed to pass in 2011 and 2012, it was reintroduced this year. 
• Pass legislation to support paid sick and family medical leave. According to CAP’s paid family and medical leave report, federally required paid family and medical leave programs will likely have positive effects on employment and lifetime income. Requiring employers to provide sick leave not only ensures workers’ rights, but it will also help lessen gender-based pay disparities since women are more likely to use unpaid sick leave to care for their children.

Conclusion

Adequately addressing and eventually eliminating the income and wealth gap experienced by women of color requires a multifaceted approach led by engagement at both the state and federal level. As women’s earnings become increasingly important to family incomes, the wage gap becomes a family issue. Promoting and uplifting women of color is crucial to growing our economy. Ensuring that all working women, and particularly women of color, receive fair wages for their work not only means that they can adequately provide for themselves and their families, but also means they can make an even greater contribution to the nation’s prosperity.

Sophia Kerby is a Research Assistant with Progress 2050 at the Center for American Progress. 

SOURCE: AP/Rick Bowmer

Lone Peak coach Quincy Lewis, center, celebrates with his team after Lone Peak defeated Alta 72–39 in the state Class 5A boys basketball championship, Saturday, March 2, 2013, in Ogden, Utah.

The late sportswriter Pete Axthelm first coined the phrase “the city game” in 1970, in regard to the many ways in which basketball was played in New York City—from the playgrounds in Harlem to the bright lights of Madison Square Garden. His outstanding 1970 book of the same name followed the 1969-70 season of the New York Knicks and how it affected the black neighborhoods in New York City.

In his book, Axthelm codified the run-and-gun, fast-break, dunk-in-your-face style of play as a so-called black thing—something done mostly by black players. Though he didn’t say it explicitly, anyone who read the book recognized the implication. Such is the power of stereotypes, which stick like crazy glue even when subtly expressed.

Consider the images Axthelm evokes in the book’s opening pages:

Basketball is the city game.

Its battlegrounds are strips of asphalt between tattered wire fences or crumbling buildings; its rhythms grow from the uneven thump of a ball against hard surfaces. …

Basketball is a game for young athletes without cars or allowances—the game whose drama and action are intensified by its confined spaces and chaotic surroundings. …

The game is simple, an act of one man challenging another, twisting, feinting, then perhaps breaking free to leap upward, directing a ball toward a target, a metal hoop ten feet above the ground … And a one-on-one challenge takes on wider meaning, defining identity and manhood in an urban society that breeds invisibility. …

Other young athletes may learn basketball, but city kids live it.

There’s no mistaking that Axthelm is writing about black kids and their passion for hoops. In the decades since the book’s publication, the image of a black baller has conflated and morphed to the point that the game itself is inextricably a projection of black culture.

It comes as something of a shock to the system, then, when a basketball team breaks the stereotype. So dribbles the Lone Peak High Knights.

The high school is in Highland, Utah—almost as far as anyone can get from the tough inner-city nooks of Harlem. And the tall, quick, and showboating players aren’t sassy, street-smart black toughs seeking an escape from poverty. No, these players are white. And Mormon. And outstanding hoopsters.

The first two of these three attributes are more often associated with a high school chess club—which the team is often confused with being—rather than a top-caliber basketball team. And yet, against all the stereotypical odds, the Lone Peak High Knights are exploding on the high school baller scene.

The team’s best player, 6’10” center Eric Mika, recently told The New York Times that opponents are often surprised when he and his teammates come to play. “There was one team we played that was literally laughing when we were warming up,” Mika said. “And we beat them by 50.”

That’s the power—and folly—of prejudice. It clouds rational thought and creates embarrassing outcomes. In this case, the mistaken assumption is that talent on the basketball court is color coded. But it’s not. Not too long ago, largely because of racial prejudices, black athletes were invisible to most Americans, leading some to question whether they even had the ability to compete with white athletes.

Nobody thinks like that nowadays. Conversely, some will argue that in some sports such as basketball, white athletes can’t compete with black players.

Try telling that to the Lone Peak Knights. They finished the season with a 26–1 record, capped earlier this month by a 72–39 victory over the Alta Hawks in the Utah 5A state championships. In winning its third-straight state title, the team ran circles around its competition this season, with an amazing 28.5-point average margin of victory.

That run of success wasn’t against cupcakes either. The Knights seek out strong competition, traveling from gym to gym to play the best teams in the nation. The team hit the road during the winter holidays to play tournaments in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and California—and it won, leaving shocked onlookers with mouths agape, all saying the same thing about their fast-paced dunking style.

Last season the Knights participated in the Beach Ball Classic, a high school tournament that attracts some of the nation’s best teams to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The team knocked off Chicago’s Whitney Young High 72–67 in a double-overtime thriller. Though the Knights lost the championship game to a team from Georgia, the school set scoring records and made people from beyond the Utah mountains take notice of the Mormon kids who can jump.

“They play like inner-city teams; how blacks consider black teams play,” Tyrone Slaughter, the Whitney Young High coach, told The New York Times. “I don’t know any other way to put it. … So many times we see the predominately white teams play a conservative style, precise style of basketball. When you see this team play, it is completely different.”

MaxPreps.com, an online site that tracks high school sports, ranked Lone Peak the nation’s top high school basketball team. The website also selected the Knights among its seventh-annual Basketball Tour of Champions, an honor that is reserved for 20 of the nation’s best high school basketball teams. Only nationally ranked and state champion teams are considered for the distinction and—given that there are more than 40,000 high school varsity basketball teams in the nation—the selection means the Knights are better than 99.9 percent of all the teams across the land.

If Axthelm, who died in 1991, had seen the Knights of Lone Peak High School play basketball, he might have reconsidered the underlying premise of his book.

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.

SOURCE: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) speaks during an interview with The Associated Press at his Capitol office in Washington, Wednesday, February 13, 2013.

I suspect that those who need to hear it most are unlikely to read—or heed—what I’m about to say. After poring through all 100 pages of the Republican National Committee’s soul-searching report released yesterday, the “Growth and Opportunity Project,” I feel compelled to offer the party faithful some advice.

Yeah, I know that I’m not the sort of person whose ideas are typically associated with a group that would nominate former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) for president. But, hey, I’m an American. I want to see a revitalized Republican Party because it’s good for the country to have at least two strong political forces battling in the marketplace of policy.

By all appearances, the GOP is careening out of control. I fear that the party’s center won’t—or can’t—hold its extremist wing from sending the entire enterprise over the abyss. How can it remain relevant by seeking guidance from the likes of Donald “You’re Fired” Trump, Sarah “Big Gulp” Palin, and Clint “I’m Talking to a Chair” Eastwood? Much more of this, and there won’t be a party of Lincoln in the near future.

That’s the part that nudges me into civil duty, to warn Republican leaders that they’re teetering perilously on the same precipice as their forbearers, the Whigs. History buffs will recall that the Whig Party disintegrated over issues of diversity of its day. Back in the 1820s and 1830s, slaves were the other Americans, unspoken as such but a fearful contradiction to the American ideal. The Whigs fought among themselves over slavery, failing to recognize or accommodate the social and demographic forces at play in the decades leading up to the Civil War. There’s nothing good about the Republican Party going the way of the Whigs, a party that died because it refused to shift in the winds of change blowing across the nation.

To be sure, signs of the impending GOP apocalypse appeared at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC. I’ll have more to say about that in a minute, but for the moment, suffice it to know that I feel it is my patriotic duty to offer some advice to those Republicans who sincerely seek to improve their standing among the diverse groups of Americans. Whether they embrace it—well, let the record show that I warned them about the Whigs.

So without further ado, here are three quick ideas to help chart a new course for the Republican Party.

It’s not about messages, it’s about policy

Almost immediately after Gov. Romney lost to President Barack Obama, GOP strategists claimed that their woes were a failure of communication, not ideas. Wrong! A mistaken message is like, well, to steal a once-popular GOP talking point, “putting lipstick on a pig.”

Yet this foolish notion persists, even as a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll suggests that just 26 percent of the public approves of Republicans and their policies, compared to 44 percent who approve of Democrats and their policies. A recent Washington Post/ABC poll also showed a 20-point net negative rating for Speaker of the House John Boehner’s (R-OH) handling of the fiscal cliff negotiations with the White House. That poll showed 31 percent approving and 51 percent disapproving of his approach. Meanwhile, a majority of the respondents—52 percent—approved of President Obama’s efforts, while 37 percent disapproved.

But those facts and numbers didn’t stop Speaker Boehner from defending the party’s political stances last weekend on ABC’s “This Week,” saying that whatever is wrong can be fixed with a clearer public relations campaign. “There’s nothing wrong with the principles of our party,” he said. “But Republicans have not done as an effective job as we should in terms of talking about our principles in terms that average people can appreciate.”

If Republicans are to regain their footing with the broadest segments of the electorate, moderation in policies affecting women, immigrants, gays, and racial minorities must be demonstratively shown—not just expressed in talking points.

But messengers do matter, so avoid the crazy

A panel discussion at last week’s CPAC gathering in suburban Maryland, just outside of the Washington Beltway, seemed tailor made for softening racial concerns about the GOP’s adherence to racism. But it went awry, badly awry—so awry that it confirmed some of the party’s worst fears.

KCarl Smith, an author and conservative activist with the Frederick Douglass Republicans, led the ill-fated discussion that was self-evidently titled “The Race Card: Are You Sick And Tired Of Being Called A Racist When You’re Not One?”

As first reported by ThinkProgress’s Scott Keyes and Zack Beauchamp, Scott Terry, a 30-year-old audience member from North Carolina, challenged Smith during his presentation, defending slavery as good for African-Americans because it provided food and shelter for them. Keyes and Beauchamp’s blog post went viral, spreading like crazy through the political blogosphere. Ultimately, a reported description in The Washington Post called it “the most awkward CPAC panel ever.”

No matter what the message is or how well it’s crafted, when crazy talk disrupts serious political gatherings, only chaos can follow. For outsiders such as me, looking in on such a ridiculous display proves why the party must get a grip on the fringe element that ruins its name and reputation.

Latino voters understand that votes speak louder than English promises

It’s great that Republican leaders are coming around to embrace comprehensive immigration reform. Better late than never.

At yesterday’s release of the “Growth and Opportunity Project” report, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said, “When Republicans lost in November, it was a wakeup call” that the party must do more to reach out to minority voters, especially in fast-growing Latino communities. More bluntly, the report itself states: “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our party’s appeal will continue to shrink.”

To that goal, the RNC report announced plans to spend $10 million to send hundreds of paid activists into Latino, black, and Asian American communities by the end of the coming summer. It’s an ambitious endeavor, and one that is destined to fail if it isn’t backed up with substance.

If Republicans expect to win over Latino voters, they must demonstrate a commitment that’s greater than a one-time vote or paying millions of dollars to ambassadors carrying shop-worn messages into barrios or the ’hood.

If you’ve read this far, then I’m taking it as sign that you’re open to radical and fundamental changes. Oh, there’s no need to pay me. My thanks will come with a changed GOP and a competitive two-party system.

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.

SOURCE: AP/Jessica Kourkounis

Over the past three decades, Houston has experienced explosive population growth—growing from 3.2 million people to 5.9 million people—mostly driven by the region’s communities of color.

Endnotes and citations are available in the PDF version of this report.

The United States is rapidly approaching the point where there will no longer be any clear racial or ethnic majority—the most recent census projections predict this will happen as early as 2043. At the same time, the fastest-growing racial and ethnic groups were hit first and worst by the recent economic downturn and face persistent barriers to achieving the levels of education, health, and employment that our nation needs to succeed in the global economy. As the entire country undergoes this dramatic demographic transformation, leaders in government, business, philanthropy, and the civic sector must take steps now to prepare for a more diverse future.

In many communities, these demographic shifts are well underway. People of color are already the majority in four states and in more than 300 counties across the country. And children of color comprise the majority of children in 10 states and 35 large metro areas. Community leaders working in these places may well have wisdom and relevant strategies to share with other communities preparing for similar population shifts.

It is in this spirit that Progress 2050—a project of the Center for American Progress—and PolicyLink—a national research and action institute advancing economic and social equity—partnered to hold a series of roundtables in communities that have already experienced aspects of this demographic shift. Over the last year we have traveled around the country to these bellwether communities to have a local dialogue with key community members about three questions:

• What are the opportunities and challenges of these demographic changes?
• What strategies are working at the local level that can inform other places and national policy?
• How can advocates shift the conversation—that most often occurs around demographic change—from one that focuses on deficits and gaps to one that is squarely focused on the opportunity of diversity?

This is the fifth report in a series documenting these roundtable discussions and describes a conversation that took place in Houston, Texas, in March 2012. Previous roundtables took place in Arlington, Virginia (July 2011); Los Angeles, California (October 2011); San Joaquin Valley, California (October 2011); and Raleigh, North Carolina (December 2011).

Roundtable participants included community activists, policy researchers, business leaders, academics, and staff from elected offices. (See the full list of convening participants on page 18.) The range of their expertise was diverse, spanning issues including—but not limited to—economic development, fair lending, financial security, education, incarceration, civil rights, and civic engagement.

We chose Texas—and specifically the city of Houston—as the site for this discussion because the Houston area is now the eighth-most diverse metro area in the nation, with 60 percent of its residents coming from communities of color. Over the past three decades, Houston has experienced explosive population growth—growing from 3.2 million people to 5.9 million people—mostly driven by the region’s communities of color. People of color accounted for 78 percent of the area’s population growth in the 1980s, 91 percent of growth in the 1990s, and 93 percent of growth in the 2000s. And as the 2012 election turned all eyes on the massive demographic shift that our nation is experiencing, Texas is a prime example of a state where both parties will be paying close attention and actively trying to engage its diverse population in the democratic process.

Houston has also experienced consistently strong job growth. Houston’s leisure and hospitality sector, for example, saw a job growth rate of 8.4 percent in the past year—four times the sector’s national increase of 2.1 percent. Moreover, its construction employment increased by 7 percent, compared to just 0.1 percent nationally. Many of these new jobs, however, are low wage, depressing incomes as a result. And since the Great Recession of 2007–2009, job growth is not keeping pace with the growing labor force. At the same time, the region’s fastest-growing groups face some of the highest poverty and unemployment and low levels of educational attainment.

Even still, our roundtable participants were optimistic that, with the right investments and changes in policy, the Houston area could make huge gains and take advantage of all the opportunities inherent in the region’s growing diversity.

We begin our account with some demographic context about Texas, particularly the Houston region. We then discuss the prominent themes—employment and education, integration, and civic engagement—that roundtable participants explained were the most pressing issues to address in the region, all the while highlighting best practices in the Houston area that can be employed on the national level.

Julie Ajinkya is a Policy Analyst for Progress 2050 at the Center for American Progress.

SOURCE: AP/Remy de la Mauviniere

Actor Forest Whitaker speaks in Paris, February 7, 2012.

Excited and agitated, my friend and colleague Liz Chen popped into my office yesterday to ask my opinion of the news that had her Facebook friends buzzing.

Last month noted actor Forest Whitaker was falsely accused of stealing from a popular New York City deli when he stopped in to buy a cup of yogurt. A Milano Market employee frisked the famous black actor, believing him to be one of the shoplifters who pocket items from the store without paying for them. As it turns out, however, Whitaker didn’t steal anything—and when the story hit the celebrity websites, the employee quit his job amid apologies from the storeowner.

But it wasn’t Whitaker’s plight that blew up Liz’s Facebook newsfeed. Instead, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s pensive New York Times essay, “The Good, Racist People,” had her Facebook pals talking about racism in a way that Liz told me she’d never experienced before. In his op-ed, Coates raises the question of what the appropriate response is from an individual, the larger public, and any sentient being to an exposed racist act.

“Facebook got started about the time I was in high school,” Liz explained. “I’d watched how conversations there have grown over time, but I’d never seen as many and as diverse a group of people all passing around that article and commenting on racism in our society as they did with this story.”

She said that the conversation among her friends—nearly all socially engaged progressives—moved from the virtual world to the physical, as a group of them gathered over the weekend and talked about Coates’s article nearly nonstop. “Most of my friends care only about their specific issues—women’s rights or gender equality or saving the whales or whatnot—but this was the first time they all came together to talk specifically about racism and issues surrounding white privilege,” she said, noting it was something of a breakthrough moment.

Liz, a Policy Analyst with American Progress’s Women’s Health and Rights Program, is a whip-smart graduate of the University of Chicago and the Washington University School of Law. Her parents are from China, but she has lived her entire life in the United States. And, like nearly every person of color that I know, she’s keenly sensitive to issues of race and identity in this country.

Liz and I talk often about these matters, partly because it’s my work and partly because of my experiences. I am 56 years old; Liz is 25 years old, not quite half my age. We learn from each other.

I came of age as the Great Society of the 1960s closed—a period defined as the “years of the black” by author and scholar David Bradley in a 1982 Esquire magazine essay. Bradley called my formative years a “fascinating epoch” during which benevolent, wealthy, and white liberals, driven by the guilt of their forefathers’ sins and the ranting of Afro’d, heat-packing, shades-wearing-at-night brothers in leather jackets persuaded politicians and activists to swallow an expensive set of social programs meant “to conceal evidence of a scandalous past or present.”

I’ve kept a copy of Bradley’s article—titled “Black and American, 1982: There Are No Good Times to Be Black in America, but Some Times Are Worse Than Others”—since the first time I read it. Back then I was starting my career as a reporter at The Charlotte Observer, my hometown newspaper, convinced that ambition and drive would take me places that my parents only imagined and that race would one day be unimportant in my life. I was right about the former and wrong about the latter.

Since my youthful days, newspapers have given way to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. But racism endures.

I have spent a lot of energy and emotion over the years on studying why that continues to be so. I haven’t figured it out. But this much I do know: Racism is like gravity. Its unseen force is omnipresent, pushing all of us to the ground. There is no permanent escape for anyone, only temporary reprieves that are more possible for those with means, contacts, and talents than those who lack such life benefits.

The most troubling part of this understanding that I’ve come slowly and unhappily over a lifetime to accept is that racism’s force seems only to be apparent to its victims. That’s why people of color—and black people, in particular—tend to make such a ruckus over the slightest of racial insults. We want “The Other” to see what they’re doing. Mostly they don’t open their eyes, but sometimes they do. It also explains why insensitive people tell us to “just get over it.”

Coates’s essay was an eye-bulging, get-’em-talking moment. Most significantly, he made it plain and put it before a larger, whiter audience of elite New York Times readers:

The idea that racism lives in the heart of particularly evil individuals, as opposed to the heart of a democratic society, is reinforcing to anyone who might, from time to time, find their tongue sprinting ahead of their discretion. We can forgive Whitaker’s assailant. Much harder to forgive is all that makes Whitaker stand out in the first place. New York is a city, like most in America, that bears the scars of redlining, blockbusting and urban renewal. The ghost of those policies haunts us in a wealth gap between blacks and whites that has actually gotten worse over the past 20 years.

But much worse, it haunts black people with a kind of invisible violence that is given tell only when the victim happens to be an Oscar winner. The promise of America is that those who play by the rules, who observe the norms of the “middle class,” will be treated as such. But this injunction is only half-enforced when it comes to black people, in large part because we were never meant to be part of the American story. Forest Whitaker fits that bill, and he was addressed as such.

In this mistakenly labeled “post-racial” period, Coates’s essay made it all the more difficult for the sighted to shield their eyes from how 21st-century racism grounds even the most exalted among us. And it begs the question: How do the rest of us respond? Do we demand an apology? Public humiliation? Boycotts? What happens when those tactics don’t produce satisfaction? I have many angry friends who tote in their heads a checklist of places and products—Shell Oil (apartheid), Denny’s Restaurants (racism), Wal-Mart (worker exploitation), Nike (child labor)—to avoid due to their past and current exhibitions of human indecency. For the most part, their individual and silent protest amounts to narcissism, a feeling of superiority over a corporation that doesn’t know they exist. Meanwhile, the vast majority of America yawns—if it even does that.

My young friend Liz and her friends are wrestling with this dilemma in their Facebook postings. Like me, they haven’t figured it out. What they do know, though, is that they can’t simply be mute. I find hope for the future in their refusing to let injustice pass without naming it.

“Maybe we are learning in a different way in the Facebook generation,” Liz said, just before our conversation closed. “I don’t have any expectations of racism ending, but on an individual level, my friends and I have a responsibility to call out people on their racism and do it in a way that they can hear.”

Who says youth is wasted on the young?

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.

SOURCE: AP/Lynne Sladky

Miami Heat's LeBron James speaks with Los Angeles Lakers' Kobe Bryant during a game on January 19, 2012. The media's stereotypical portrayals of race have obscured reality in sports.

I’m no longer sure that seeing is believing.

As a former newspaper journalist, I’m disheartened to say that what you now see in the media isn’t always an objective reality. Even when an article or broadcast reports the truth, the accompanying pictures and images can sometimes impress upon readers or viewers another set of facts that may be at odds with the story.

Harvard University professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, for example, delights in detailing how he used the gross distortion of media imagery of black men in sports to win a bar bet with the folks at the Veterans of Foreign Wars, or VFW, post in his hometown of Piedmont, West Virginia.

In an essay written for Sports Illustrated, Gates, an authority on African American literature and culture, told his drinking buddies that there were approximately 35 million black people living in the United States. He then wagered $5 to anyone who could tell him how many African Americans make a living playing professional sports in the United States.

The group of sports-loving men smiled, knowing they had a sucker in their midst. Everyone at the VFW post knew that blacks dominate some of the most popular sports in America. All they had to do was turn on their televisions, right?

Gates, a great raconteur, tells the story:

“Ten million!” yelled one intrepid soul, too far into his cups.
“No way … more like 500,000,” said another.
“You mean all professional sports,” someone interjected, “including golf and tennis, but not counting the brothers from Puerto Rico?” Everyone laughed.
“Fifty thousand, minimum,” was another guess.

At the end of the day, nobody won the money—all of the men grossly exaggerated their numbers. As Gates reported in Sports Illustrated, the facts about black athletes in America at the time his article was published were stunningly low:

• There were 1,200 black professional athletes in all U.S. sports.
• There were 12 times more black lawyers than black athletes.
• There were 20 times more black dentists than black athletes.
• There were 15 times more black doctors than black athletes.

Arkansas Gazette sportswriter Jon Entine surveyed all professional sports teams in 2008 and figured that while 13 percent of the nation’s population is black, 80 percent of the players in the National Basketball Association and 67 percent of the players in the National Football Association are black. Or, to put it another way, Entine calculated that the odds of a black teenager in America becoming a professional athlete are 4,000-to-1.

Such hard-to-believe facts contradict what so many Americans imagine they know based on what they see on TV. After all, this is a sports-crazed nation, and what sports fan doesn’t watch ESPN—and especially its popular “SportsCenter” program—where black people are overrepresented as athletes and announcers? The sports media industry doesn’t have to say explicitly that black athletes dominate sports. They just show an endless highlight reel of slam dunks and touchdown runs, and the pictures speak for themselves.

But a picture can—and often does—lie.

Which brings me to the cover art of last week’s Bloomberg Businessweek magazine. Illustrating a story about the rebounding U.S. housing market, the Bloomberg editors chose inexplicably to run a cartoonish drawing of people with overt racial and ethnic features apparently swimming in a cash-filled house.

The cover drew almost immediate—and all negative—reactions. My colleague at ThinkProgress, Alyssa Rosenberg, described the cover as “awful as art” and quoted media critic Ryan Chittum’s description of the cover in the Columbia Journalism Review as “awful as journalism.”

Of course, a Bloomberg Businessweek editor soon apologized. “Our cover illustration last week got strong reactions, which we regret,” Josh Tyrangiel, the magazine’s editor, wrote in a statement sent to several news outlets. “Our intention was not to incite or offend. If we had to do it over again, we’d do it differently.”

But that’s not good enough. As Rosenberg argues, the magazine’s editors and publishers need to come clean, not issue a mealy mouthed apology. “If you want to walk a line and publish edgy covers, you have a particular obligation to think about where the line is,” she writes. “And if you want forgiveness, you need to actually look at yourself and your practices in a systemic way.”

The NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, the National Fair Housing Alliance, and the Center for Responsible Lending have taken up the charge as well, demanding a full explanation and apology for the offensive cover. In an email sent to NAACP supporters, Dedrick Muhammad, senior director of the NAACP Economic Department, condemned the magazine:

The insulting part of this cover isn’t just the derogatory and cartoonish depiction of racial and ethnic minorities, but rather the insinuation that homeowners—coincidentally all people of color—are somehow greatly profiting today as the housing sector slowly recovers … We know where the fault really lies: unscrupulous banks and predatory lenders who exploited our most vulnerable citizens with reckless abandon. It is these institutions who have had a “Great American Rebound” as the article itself notes.

But that’s not what the image shows. Whether in professional sports or big business, stereotypical images steep into the collective consciences of those who view them and mistakenly believe they’ve seen the entire truthful picture.

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050. 

Patrick Oakford is a Research Assistant in the Economic Policy department at the Center for American Progress. Vanessa Cárdenas is the Director of Progress 2050 at the Center. 

SOURCE: AP/Barry Williams

Emory University Chairman of the Board of Trustees Ben Johnson III, left, introduces the University's next president, James W. Wagner, Wednesday, July 30, 2003, at the Emory Conference Center Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia.

Emory University President James W. Wagner is having a horrible start to the winter term on his Atlanta campus. Unfortunately for him, his woes are self-inflicted.

Attempting to make the case for greater cooperation toward finding solutions for politically and socially difficult issues, Wagner argued in a recent campus magazine column that compromise is a good and noble tool. Specifically, he referred to the stalemate in Congress, which has failed to find common ground on the nation’s budget. So far, so good.

But to drive home his point, he favorably cited the three-fifths clause in the U.S. Constitution—perhaps the worst historic example of a compromise. Wagner wrote:

One instance of constitutional compromise was the agreement to count three-fifths of the slave population for purposes of state representation in Congress. Southern delegates wanted to count the whole slave population, which would have given the South greater influence over national policy. Northern delegates argued that slaves should not be counted at all, because they had no vote. As the price for achieving the ultimate aim of the Constitution—“to form a more perfect union”—the two sides compromised on this immediate issue of how to count slaves in the new nation. Pragmatic half-victories kept in view the higher aspiration of drawing the country more closely together.

A sidebar history lesson is necessary here: The three-fifths clause wasn’t actually a compromise. It was a provision of the Constitution that the Framers inserted to apportion voting rights and taxation policies in slave-holding states.

As Paul Finkelman, author of Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson, noted in a recent article for The Root, the three-fifths clause “is perhaps the most misunderstood” part of the document. He wrote:

The clause provides that representation in Congress will be based on “the whole Number of free Persons” and “three fifths of all other Persons.” The “other Persons” were slaves. Despite popular understandings, this provision did not declare that African Americans were three-fifths of a person. Rather, the provision declared that the slave states would get extra representation in Congress for their slaves, even though those states treated slaves purely as property.

Predictably, Wagner’s comments sparked viral outrage on social and digital media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Emory faculty members censured him for a gross misunderstanding of history and for bringing academic discredit to his office. Students marched in protest and called for his resignation. Moreover, Emory has been pilloried in the national media.

This is not the most unfortunate part of the story, however. As awful as Wagner’s comments were, the most obvious lesson learned from his mistake might well be not to bring racial history into contemporary discourse. Indeed, Wagner’s ambition was to link a historic compromise to a current concern. I’d argue that his impulse was noble, maybe even courageous. It’s just that Wagner lacked knowledge and failed to fully understand the point he was trying to make.

Seeking to put the matter behind him, Wagner has apologized with great personal shame. “Certainly, I do not consider slavery anything but heinous, repulsive, repugnant, and inhuman,” Wagner wrote to the campus in an addendum to his magazine column. “I should have stated that fact clearly in my essay. I am sorry for the hurt caused by not communicating more clearly my own beliefs. To those hurt or confused by my clumsiness and insensitivity, please forgive me.”

It’s unlikely the brouhaha will bring down the president, whose academic background is in electrical engineering—not in history or the humanities. But clearly, Wagner has learned a valuable lesson. But will anyone one else daring to talk about race benefit from his painful, public example?

By holding Wagner out for intense ridicule, the message that I fear others might take away from this mess is to steer clear of race talk when a slip of the tongue might cause an equal measure of public shame to be heaped upon them, too. That would be a mistake of even greater consequence.

Certainly more knowledge—not less—is needed about our racial history and how it might affect us today. But whatever we do, we shouldn’t avoid public engagement of the topic. That only magnifies ignorance.

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.

SOURCE: AP/Mel Evans

Then-Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) holds the hand of Nikita McFarland, a student at Isles YouthBuild Institute, Friday, February 29, 2008, in Trenton, New Jersey.

Thanks to congressional Republicans putting the economy in jeopardy during the debt ceiling debacle in the summer of 2011 and again in 2012, a package of automatic across-the-board spending cuts known as sequestration is set to go into effect on March 1, 2013. Senate Democrats have proposed a balanced approach to resolve this crisis, urging congressional Republicans to avoid the damaging sequester cuts by accepting a package of more tax revenue coupled with targeted spending cuts. But once again Republicans are threatening the economy by risking massive and harmful spending cuts that will hurt the middle class, damage the economy, kill hundreds of thousands of jobs, and harm the most economically vulnerable among us.

Sequestration will impact all Americans but will have a particularly harmful effect on communities of color, who were hit first and worst by the Great Recession and have yet to significantly feel the effects of the recovery. Our nation’s demographics are changing, and communities of color are the fastest-growing group of Americans. It is important that we invest now in these communities, as we prepare for our nation’s economic future and upcoming workforce needs.

Our driving focus should be on averting crises that slow our economy and instead, promoting policies that help all Americans.

Below are the top 10 reasons why communities of color should pay attention to sequestration and the impact it will have in these communities:

1. Deep cuts to long-term unemployment benefits will disproportionately affect people of color. Extended federal unemployment benefits remain vulnerable under sequestration, and the long-term unemployed—those out of work and searching for a new job for at least six months—could lose almost 10 percent of their weekly jobless benefits if the sequester cuts go into effect next week. These cuts will have a greater impact on people of color, as 9.7 percent of Latinos and a staggering 13.8 percent of blacks are unemployed, compared to only 7 percent of whites. What’s more, in 2011, 40 percent of unemployed Asians, 38 percent of unemployed blacks, and 28 percent of unemployed Latinos were unemployed for more than 52 weeks.

2. Workforce development programs that are vital to communities of color such as YouthBuild and Job Corps face significant cuts. YouthBuild, a program connecting low-income youth to education and training, could be cut by about 8 percent under sequestration. Coupled with previous federal appropriation cuts in fiscal year 2011 by 37 percent, the program could see about one-third of its federal funding cut between fiscal year 2010 and fiscal year 2013. In 2010, 54 percent of YouthBuild participants were African American and 20 percent were Latino. Job Corps, an education and training program geared toward young adults, faces about $83 million in cuts in FY 2013 under sequestration. In 2011, 72 percent of Job Corps participants were people of color.

3. Cuts to critical job-creating programs such as the Build America Bonds program are also on the chopping block. Build America Bonds, which were created in the 2009 stimulus bill, provides incentives for infrastructure investments through the tax code. Since its inception, the program has helped states and cities fund thousands of job-creating infrastructure projects at lower costs than traditional tax-exempt municipal bonds. Build America Bonds could see budget cuts of up to 7.6 percent, however, if sequestration goes through. Build America Bonds benefit all Americans, as more than $106 billion of Build America Bonds have been issued by state and local governments in 49 states and the District of Columbia since the program started. Infrastructure investments stimulate employment in sectors that employ disproportionately high rates of workers of color, such as construction and public transit.

4. Federal budget cuts under sequestration would quickly mean cuts to federal, state, and local public-sector jobs, which disproportionately employ women and African Americans. In 2011 employed African Americans comprised 20 percent of the federal, state, and local public-sector workforce, and women were nearly 50 percent more likely than men to work in the public sector. According to the Congressional Budget Office, scheduled cuts in federal spending were the primary driving force behind slow economic growth projected for this year, meaning thousands of lost jobs and cuts to federal contractors. 

5. Early child care funding could be cut by more than $900 million, impacting the thousands of children of color who benefit from these programs. Such cuts will mean 70,000 children will be kicked out of Head Start, a federal program that promotes the school readiness of children from low-income families from birth through age 5. Sixty percent of program participants are children of color.

6. Programs that directly help the most vulnerable families and children—such as the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC—are threatened by sequestration. WIC serves as a supplemental food and nutrition program for low-income pregnant, breastfeeding, and postpartum women and for children under age 5. The program could be cut by $543 million—a devastating loss to the more than 450,000 people of color who benefit from its services.

7. Federal education funding cuts will disproportionately hurt students of color. If the sequester goes into effect, nearly $3 billion would be cut in education alone, including cuts to financial aid for college students and to programs for our most vulnerable youth—English language learners and those attending high-poverty, struggling schools—impacting 9.3 million students. Such cuts will affect key programs that receive federally funded grants such as Education for Homeless Children and Youth and federal work study. The lack of access to financial aid for people of color will further exacerbate the student debt rates in these communities. In the 2007-08 academic year, 81 percent of African Americans and 67 percent of Latinos with a bachelor’s degree graduated with student debt, compared to 64 percent of their white peers. Cutting access to these vital financial aid programs will curtail the higher education aspirations of tens of thousands of students of color.

8. Cuts to critical medical research put patients at risk. The National Institutes of Health would lose $1.5 billion in medical research funding, meaning fewer research projects would be aimed at finding treatments and cures for diseases such as cancer and diabetes—both of which are among the leading causes of death for African Americans.

9. Since 2010 funding for housing has been cut by $2.5 billion, meaning any additional cuts would significantly hurt low-income families and communities. Many housing programs such as Section 8 Housing Assistance provide vouchers to low-income families for affordable housing in the private market. In 2011 Section 8 aided more than 2 million low-income families across the country. Data from 2008 indicate that 44 percent and 23 percent of public housing recipients are African American and Latino, respectively. 

10. As the nation continues to endure a cold winter, programs such as the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, which helps bring down the cost of heating for low-income households, are crucial. The Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helped about 23 million low-income people pay their winter heat bills, is in jeopardy of being cut in FY 2013. Low-income communities, which tend to disproportionately comprise of people of color, depend on such programs to make ends meet during these tough economic times.

In order to avoid significant damage to the U.S. economy—and particularly to communities of color across the country—congressional Republicans should agree to a balanced package to replace the sequester and its damaging cuts.

Sophia Kerby is the Special Assistant for Progress 2050 at the Center for American Progress.

SOURCE: AP/ Toby Talbot

Barwako Abayle, an immigrant student from Burlington High School, listens during a meeting with lawmakers about racial inequality at her school on April 26, 2012 in Montpelier, Vermont.

Note: This is the second of two columns on black Americans and immigration reform. Today, I examine the history and plight of black immigrants in the United States.

Thanks in large part to the prevalence of media narratives, the current discussion of immigration reform is often represented by a Latino face. This works well to impress a human story in portraying the need for the nation to reform our dysfunctional immigration system. But the emphasis on the Latino story as the immigrant story fails to capture the broader, more complex issue.

Many Americans are familiar with the stories about work-seeking immigrants who crossed our southern border and are compelled to live and toil in the shadows of opportunity. Often overlooked or ignored, however, are the estimated 3 million black immigrants whose daily plight in the United States is no less dramatic or demanding of public attention. While the vast majority of black immigrants are legal residents concentrated in large cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Miami, an estimated 400,000 of them lack documents that would allow them to live openly.

“It’s been nerve-racking because it puts me at risk,” Tolu Olubunmi told the world at a news conference in 2011, announcing her undocumented status and her willingness to work for comprehensive immigration reform. “But I think you have to focus on the individual to get away from the politics of an issue that’s so divisive. Once you know that there are real people attached to the statistics, then you have to start working on real solutions.”

(Full disclosure: Tolu, 32, was born in Lagos, Nigeria, and was brought to the United States by her mother when she was 14. Her activism is well known to me—she was one of the inaugural fellows of the Center for American Progress’s Leadership Institute, a program I created to increase the number of public policy experts from communities of color. Her work to bring about a change in the nation’s immigration policies continues in her new job as a senior policy analyst at the Center for Community Change in Washington, D.C.)

As is the case with any immigrant to the United States, black immigrants find their way to this country in search of their own American Dream. Yet unlike many white immigrants, they discover heightened barriers in reaching their dream. The persistence of racism and anti-black bias in many forms of American life comes as a rude awakening to those who expect opportunity to be limited only by their willingness for hard work.

Although the nation has long had a significant black population, owing to its legacy of slavery and the importation of Africans as chattel property, the history of willful and voluntary black immigration is a relatively recent development.

According to figures in a recent Pew Social Trends report, immigration from the Caribbean—primarily Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Dominican Republic—ticked up after the Spanish-American War ended in 1898. But the real expansion occurred after passage of 1965 federal laws that enabled people from countries other than Europe to find their place in this country.

Immigration from Africa was rare until the late 20th century, as many came from Africa to study in the United States and decided to stay. The Pew report estimates, however, that about 21 percent of African immigrants are undocumented. Moreover, no single country dominates the flow from the many African nations. Nigeria, which produced the largest single group of black immigrants in 2009, only accounted for about one in five of all black African immigrants that year, Pew reported.

Immigrants from Africa were also among the fastest-growing groups within the U.S. foreign-born population from 2000 to 2009. If current trends continue, the Pew analysts predict that Africa will replace the Caribbean by 2020 as the major source of black immigration to the United States.

Helina Faris, a former intern with the Center for American Progress’s Immigration team, recently noted:

Even with high levels of education, black immigrants tend to earn low wages compared to other similarly trained immigrant or native workers. In 2011 black immigrants had the highest unemployment rate—12.5 percent—of any foreign-born group in the United States. Proposed immigration reforms such as reductions in family-based admissions and elimination of the diversity visa lottery could affect the flow of black immigrants to the United States, cutting off all legal means of entry into the country.

That’s unfortunate because immigration reform is needed to assist more than a single ethnic or population group. It’s required for fairness to all who currently work—and wait—in the shadows of opportunity.

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.

See also:

• Race and Beyond: Black Immigration Views Too Often Ignore Fact and History by Sam Fulwood

SOURCE: AP/Mel Evans

With Ellis Island in the background, a group of immigrant rights advocates march on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, in Liberty State Park, Jersey City, New Jersey.

This Valentine’s Day—a day that we should all be showing love and compassion for one another—there are many ways that we can be respectful of one another’s beliefs and rights. Though issues such as immigration, reproductive rights, gun-violence protection, and marriage equality are controversial, many more Americans now agree than disagree on such topics.

Upon the review of several polls, it’s clear that there are plenty of things about which a majority of Americans feel good. Below is a diverse list of a number of the latest public opinion polls covering issues from immigration to gun-violence prevention—issues that, as it turns out, foster far more agreement than debate, despite the largely partisan rhetoric emanating lately from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Immigration

1. Gallup: Americans widely support immigration reform proposals

Gallup published a poll on February 5 showing strong support for many immigration reform proposals. A vast majority of respondents—72 percent—were in favor of a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants if they meet certain requirements, while 71 percent wanted to increase the number of visas available to immigrants who have advanced skills in science and technology. Breaking down the responses by party affiliation, a majority of Republicans, Democrats, and independents would like to see these reforms.

2. America’s Voice: More than 6 in 10 Americans see immigration as a “good thing”

A poll released by America’s Voice on January 18 found strong support not only for immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship but also for immigration itself. More than 6 in 10 Americans believe that immigration is a good thing for America, including 63 percent of whites, 70 percent of blacks, and 69 percent of Latinos. Additionally, more than 73 percent of respondents were in favor of a pathway to citizenship, compared to only 22 percent who favored deportation.

3. CNN/ORC International: A majority of Americans think the government should prioritize integrating immigrants rather than deporting them

CNN released a poll on January 22 showing that a majority of Americans—53 percent—think the main focus of the federal government should not be deportation—rather, it should be to develop a plan that would allow undocumented immigrants to become legal residents. This is a switch from 2011, when 55 percent of Americans said that the government should prioritize deportation and stopping undocumented immigrants from entering the country. Americans now not only see immigration as a good thing, but they also think that the government should devote more resources to providing a pathway to citizenship for our immigrant population.

Reproductive rights

4. Pew Research Center: A majority of men, women, blacks, and whites support Roe v. Wade

A report published by the Pew Forum on Religious & Public Life on January 16 found broad support for upholding the Supreme Court’s decision in its landmark case, Roe v. Wade, which recognized a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion. A full 63 percent of men—along with 64 percent of women, 66 percent of whites, and 67 percent of blacks—said the decision should not be overturned.

5. NBC News/Wall Street Journal: A majority of Americans feel “strongly” that Roe v. Wade not be overturned

NBC News and The Wall Street Journal released a poll on January 22 revealing that 70 percent of Americans do not think that Roe v. Wade should be overturned. Of all those asked, 57 percent said that they “felt strongly” about upholding the 1973 Supreme Court decision.

Gun-violence prevention

6. Pew Research Center: A majority of Americans agree that certain regulations are needed to prevent gun violence

A Pew Research Center poll released on December 20, 2012, found that 65 percent of Americans—including majorities of both blacks and whites—believe that allowing citizens to own assault weapons makes the country more dangerous. A majority of Americans are also in favor of banning bullets designed to explode or penetrate bulletproof vests (56 percent) and banning high-capacity ammunition clips (53 percent). The results of the poll indicate that there is widespread approval for regulations that would prevent gun violence.

7. Survey USA: Parents with children at home agree that easy access to guns contributes to violence

Common Sense Media and the Center for American Progress commissioned Survey USA to conduct a nationwide poll of parents with children under the age of 18. The poll, released on January 7, asked parents what they believe causes violence in society. While three-fourths of parents said that shielding children from violence is difficult, the same share also agreed that easy access to guns contributes to violence in the United States. A majority of all ethnic and racial groups agreed that easy access to guns promoted gun violence in their communities.

8. Washington Post/ABC News Poll: A majority of Americans are in favor of President Obama’s proposal to prevent gun violence

The results of a poll conducted by The Washington Post and ABC News revealed that 53 percent of all adults have a “favorable impression” of President Obama’s proposed gun-violence prevention measures. The poll, released on February 8, also found that 50 percent of registered voters, 56 percent of college graduates, and 51 percent of Independent voters were in favor of the president’s proposal. There was also strong support among communities of color: 83 percent of blacks and 68 percent of Latinos said they agreed with President Obama’s plan.

Marriage equality

9. CBS News and Pew Research Center/NBC/WSJ: A strong majority of young Americans and a growing number of people of color support marriage equality

A CBS News poll published on November 30 found that among all those Americans ages 18 to 29, 72 percent say that same-sex marriage should be legal and that same-sex couples should be afforded the same rights as traditional married couples. Marriage equality also finds growing support among communities of color: Support for marriage equality has risen 13 points—from 26 percent to 39 percent—among blacks since 1996. Among Latinos, support for marriage equality has risen from 45 percent to 55 percent just since 2009.

10. USA Today/Gallup: Most Americans support legalizing marriage for same-sex couples

USA Today and Gallup jointly released a poll on December 5showing that in addition to strong support for marriage equality among young people, a majority of Americans—53 percent—believes that same-sex marriage should be legal and that same-sex couples should be afforded the same rights as traditional married couples. This is a significant increase from eight years ago, when support for marriage equality stood at 42 percent, and from 1996, when it stood at 27 percent.

Any healthy democracy is home to a wide variety of ideas and opinions, but the polls discussed above show that even in this year’s most heated debates, broad agreement can still be found. On a day we typically spend sharing our love and compassion with others, here’s to also sharing attitudes that are moving us toward a stronger and better America.

Morriah Kaplan is an intern with Progress 2050 at the Center for American Progress.

SOURCE: AP/Alan Diaz

Immigration reform activists hold a sign in front of Freedom Tower in downtown Miami, Florida, Monday, January 28, 2013.

Note: This is the first of two columns on attitudes among black Americans regarding the nation’s immigration policies. Today’s column is an examination of why African Americans must engage in the immigration conversation.

Whenever the subject of reforming the nation’s broken immigration system comes up in casual talks among my friends, all too often the conversation veers off track and heads into the trite and ugly direction of “us-versus-them.”

No doubt you, too, have been captured in a dialogue about immigration that quickly goes awry:

They’re taking all our jobs.

I can’t understand what they’re saying. Why don’t they speak English like everyone else?

Why should my taxes pay for them to get welfare so they can live better than me?

The government ought to be helping me find a job, not helping them.

Why don’t they just go back to whatever country they came from? We’d all be better off.

I find such ignorant blather frustrating and disappointing for two reasons.

First, it’s flat-out erroneous. I’ve spent a considerable amount of my professional life studying and writing about immigration, enough time to recognize that anyone who spouts such blatant lies has a base disregard for accuracy and an emotional adherence to xenophobic bigotry. Easily accessible facts don’t support such nonsense.

As my Center for American Progress colleagues Marshall Fitz, Philip E. Wolgin, and Patrick Oakford recently made clear in an online brief, “Mainstream economists have thoroughly debunked this general stereotype of immigrants as takers, finding that immigrants are a net positive for the economy and pay more into the system than they take out. … immigrants are in fact ‘makers,’ not takers.”

But the second reason is the truly disappointing one. Given my social circles, I most often hear black Americans making these ugly comments. It’s as if the people talking this trash immigrants have suffered a collective case of historic amnesia. Indeed, it wasn’t very long ago that similar things were being said about them (us) and their (our) families—or people who look very much like them and their family members.

At present, a national conversation on immigration reform is taking place. Although the White House hasn’t released an advance copy of tonight’s State of the Union address, well-informed observers say President Barack Obama is expected to make immigration reform a key item. In recent meetings with immigrant rights activists and House Democrats, the president has said that he wants Congress to provide a pathway to citizenship for the more than 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the nation’s shadows.

“I am heartened to see Republicans and Democrats starting to be in a serious conversation about getting this done,” President Obama told the House Democrats gathered last week in Landsdowne, Virginia, for their annual caucus. “Now is the time.”

To be sure, political considerations lie at the heart of the serious conversations between Republicans and Democrats on immigration. After President Obama won the lion’s share of all minority votes (including 93 percent of African Americans, 71 percent of Latinos, and 73 percent of Asian Americans) in last year’s general election, GOP strategists are looking to make sure that disparity never happens again.

But politics may mask the moral imperative at the heart of immigration reform. For black Americans, what is just should always trump other considerations at the ballot box. That’s why black Americans must avoid the easy trap of seeing immigrants as “the other” instead of as one among us. In fact, anyone who waves the civil rights banner must allow it to embrace the call for comprehensive immigration reform.

Marlon Hill, a blogger for The Grio, makes a compelling argument for black Americans to engage in the national conversation on immigration reform.

In recent years, the immigration debate has been centered around border security and subsequently, the media’s “Hispanicizing” the conversation into a narrow focus. On the contrary, our American humanity is much more diverse than meets the naked eye of the headlines, or the naked ear of cable talk shows. …

At first glance or thought, African-Americans may not inherently see themselves the product of immigration. The truth is, we are. … we must also remember that we cannot confront future political and legislative fights on our own without demonstrating solidarity with others who fight for equality, respect, and recognition as part of the American fabric.

Or to be more forthright: The fight for comprehensive immigration reform is our struggle too.

Next week: The overlooked plight and promise of immigrants from the Caribbean and African nations.

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.

SOURCE: AP/Matt Sayles

Harry Belafonte walks onstage to accept the Spingarn award at the 44th Annual NAACP Image Awards at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on Friday, February 1, 2013.

Few famous people register more than a yawn of recognition on my aging attention span. Thanks to celebrities’ omnipresence in the media, I’m aware of them, but I’m mostly flummoxed by what their flash represents in my life—or anyone else’s.

USA Today, a media outlet that led the way toward the glorification of celebrity style over substance in America, for example, tells me that Kim Kardashian; two of her sisters, Khloe and Kourtney; along with Kanye West, Bethenny Frankel, and Brandi Glanville rate high on this month’s Celebrity Heat Index—an unscientific accounting of good or bad media exposure in the first month of 2013. What does that have to do with anything?

Sometimes, however, I’m delighted when a famous person uses the klieg lights to focus attention on something greater than flashing bling.

Actor Bradley Cooper, for instance, created quite a stir in our CAP offices last Friday, when he stood next to Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D) and Patrick Kennedy, the former Democratic Rhode Island congressman, to discuss how his recent film, “Silver Linings Playbook,” is helping to erase some of the irrational stigmas associated with mental illness. Cooper is the star of the movie and portrays a man with bipolar disorder.

Later that night, I was thrilled to watch singer and activist Harry Belafonte use the NAACP Image Awards to speak out on gun violence. But he actually did more than just bemoan the issue, which has been all over the headlines following calls to change our lax gun laws in the wake of the high-profile shootings of school children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

Belafonte, whose long history of civil rights engagement stretches back to using his celebrity to draw attention and support for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s activism in the 1960s, took advantage of the live broadcast of the NAACP Image Awards in Los Angeles to challenge black Americans to stare down those who support lax gun laws. “In the gun game,” he said, “we are the most hunted.”

Belafonte’s remarks help keep the nation’s focus on all the young victims of gun violence. That would include not only the 20 children killed in Newtown, but it would also encompass the lesser-known victims in places such as Chicago, where, for example, 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton was fatally shot last month—only a week after performing with a school group at President Barack Obama’s inauguration parade.

As I write this, I’m in Chicago listening to police and community leaders plead with the public to help find the killer responsible for shooting into the crowd and ending Hadiya’s life. A community reward has grown to $40,000.

Jill Garvey, executive director of the Center for New Community, a Chicago-based community-organizing group, recently observed in a posting on her organization’s Imagine 2050 blog that the need to address guns in America is urgent—but for reasons that go beyond recent events. She pointed to the Sandy Hook victims but also noted the 24 Chicago Public School students who were fatally shot during the 2011–12 school year—and the 319 Chicago Public School students who were wounded by gunshots during the same period.

Meanwhile, Chicago preachers are praying and mourners are preparing to attend yet another funeral on Saturday.

The Rev. Courtney Maxwell of Greater Deliverance Temple—Hadiya’s family pastor—said community leaders have asked President Obama to attend the funeral. So far the pastor hasn’t heard back from the White House about that, though the president did call the family shortly after the shooting, Rev. Maxwell said.

With far too little fanfare, the president has twice mentioned gun violence in Chicago during speeches, as he tries to promote the administration’s impending legislation aimed at curbing gun violence. Still, some such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson have urged President Obama to play an even greater, more personal role in Hadiya’s case.

But Belafonte took a different route. He argued that gun violence is a public crisis and called on average black Americans—not just those who are famous or politically prominent—to speak out and act to stop the violence.

“The river of blood that washes the streets of our nation flows mostly from the bodies of our black children,” Belafonte said during the NAACP telecast. “Where is the raised voice of black America? Why are we mute?”

Earlier last week Belafonte previewed that message in an interview with the Associated Press, noting that gun violence has crippled black communities for decades but hasn’t received anything near the attention that the December school shooting did.

“What really concerns me is the ingredients of the discourse,” he said to the AP reporter. “The African-American community … where is that community? Where is that voice? I think the black community, the black leadership need to stir it up.”

Belafonte, 85, has been in the public eye for longer than most of today’s so-called celebrities have been alive. As such, he understands what so many of them fail to comprehend: Being famous is worthless if it’s not used to lift up the unknown people who celebrate your name.

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.

SOURCE: AP/Toby Talbot

Nancy Sabin visits with a mother and child in Highgate, Vermont, Thursday, March 5, 2009. The Family and Medical Leave Act has certainly helped American workers, but many workers of color, who experience disproportionate rates of economic insecurity, are either ineligible or unable financially to take leave under the law.

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the Family and Medical Leave Act—a landmark piece of legislation that was signed into law in 1993 to help balance work and life in American households. The law allows U.S. workers up to 12 weeks of unpaid job-protected leave so they can recover from a serious illness, provide care for an ill family member, or take care of a newborn child.

While this legislation was a huge step forward in recognizing the changing nature of American families, as well as the importance of job protection in workers’ lives, only about 60 percent of the workforce qualifies for FMLA leave. Moreover, because the leave is unpaid, many Americans who are eligible simply cannot afford to take it. Indeed, nearly half of workers who qualify for this leave but do not take it say they are unable to for financial reasons, and two-thirds of those who do take leave report experiencing financial difficulties as a result.

Given that workers of color experience disproportionate rates of economic insecurity, it is no surprise that the financial burdens of an unpaid leave program would disadvantage them the most. Households led by women of color are more likely to be struggling financially, with 41 percent of African American female-headed households and 44.5 percent of Latina-headed households living in poverty in 2010. Workers of color are also more likely to be ineligible for job-protected FMLA leave due to the law’s job-tenure and employer-size requirements, despite the fact that American Time Use Survey data shows that workers of color are disproportionately more likely to need leave.

As more women become the primary breadwinners for their families, it is important to support policy changes that acknowledge the importance of both work and family responsibilities—particularly caregiving for elders and children, which has disproportionately been fulfilled by women in households of all races and ethnicities. It is especially important to realize, however, that while women with caregiving responsibilities seem to fare worse economically than women without these duties or their male counterparts, women of color with these responsibilities still fare even worse. For instance, while the typical median income of a white female-headed household with children was $29,560 in 2011, African American female-headed households with children reported $21,728 and Latina-headed households with children reported $21,766 as their median annual income.

Why should women—or men, for that matter—have to choose between being productive members of our country’s workforce and taking care of their own health or the health of their loved ones? We must remember that it is in our entire nation’s best interest to make sure that our workers are able to do both and are not forced to make a false choice between taking unpaid leave or not being able to care for themselves or their families.

This economic insecurity is already having a negative impact on women’s decisions to bear children. Research shows that our country’s fertility rate has fallen during periods of economic decline, and the recent recession reveals similar trends across all racial and ethnic groups: The fertility rate for black women dropped from 2.5 births in 1990 to 2 births in 2010, while the Latina fertility rate dropped from 3 births to 2.4 births over the same time period. While there are many factors that go into a woman’s decision to have a child, economic security cannot be underestimated.

If this decline in fertility rates continues in communities of color, it will affect the future of the United States—particularly our future workforce, which research shows increasingly relies on diversity to remain competitive in a global economy. The United States remains the only industrialized nation that not only does not offer paid maternity leave to its workers, but also does not guarantee them the right to earned sick days. If we do not invest in our workers today—making sure to pay special attention to the disproportionate financial burdens that workers of color bear—by providing them with the basic assistance to do their jobs, stay healthy, and take care of their families, how do we expect our nation to succeed in the future?

The initial passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act 20 years ago was a good start to acknowledging the changing needs of our nation’s families, but hopefully President Barack Obama in his second term will finish the job that President Bill Clinton started. Social Security Cares, for instance, is a proposal for a national paid family and medical leave insurance program that would cover the same life events as the Family and Medical Leave Act and would offer partial wage replacement funded through a small (less than 0.5 percent) increase in the payroll tax.

By making sure that more Americans don’t have to choose between being a good worker and good family member, we can prove that as a nation we have what it takes to adapt to our changing demographics, changing households, and changing needs.

Julie Ajinkya is a Policy Analyst for Progress 2050 at the Center for American Progress.

SOURCE: AP/ Chris Gardner

Taylor Branch answers a question during an interview soon after the release of his book, "At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68" on January 15, 2006.

Historian Taylor Branch believes that this year, not fully a month old, marks a unique opportunity for Americans to reflect and learn from our past.

Speaking last week at a book signing forum sponsored by the Aspen Institute, Branch recalled the state of race relations in parts of the United States a little more than a generation ago—50 years ago to be precise, in 1963—a time that brought forth a stream of watershed moments in our nation’s incomplete rise from a shameful history of racism:

In a South that had segregation embedded in the constitutions of the southern states, and in the institutions widespread across the North. In a society that was so segregated that it’s beyond the memory we take for granted all of these things … College sports in the South were segregated. … There was no Sun Belt, it was poor. Segregated by race down to the public libraries. Segregated by gender to the point that there were no female students at the University of Virginia, very few at my old alma mater, North Carolina. None at Yale and Princeton yet. Let alone in West Point. Let alone in combat in the military. The word “gay” hadn’t even been invented. No, nothing for disability. No seatbelts in cars. TV ads incessantly promoting cigarettes as healthy, sophisticated, and invigorating. That’s 50 years ago.

Branch recalled the date—January 14, 1963—when then-Alabama Gov. George Wallace pledged in his Inaugural Address to defy rising black demands for equality with his now-infamous “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” speech. That speech on the cold steps of the Alabama Capitol Building in Montgomery, helped set the stage for the blossoming of the civil rights movement, which would over the next five years change the nation forever—for good and ill.

“Wallace pledged to protect segregation,” said Branch to a rapt audience. “Only 50 years ago. He failed.”

But, Branch continued, he succeeded in planting the seeds of the right-wing, antigovernment attitude that endures to this day:

[Wallace] started cussing, when it was no longer respectable to stand up and defend segregation, he started cussing the government and the politics that people resented and feared for these changes ahead. He talked about pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington telling you how to run your business, and where you had to send your children to school. And that they were in cahoots with a biased national media that had a racial agenda. Whose effective goal was to concentrate all … power in the central government in Washington.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? It does to Branch:

That language is contemporary. It’s the language of “Government is bad.” … It started out consciously in resistance, though Wallace’s … second step, after inventing all of these ingenious terms that we live with, his second one was to insist indignantly, whenever questioned, that he had never said anything in his whole public career that had any bad racial reflection on anyone. And that there was no racial motive in any of this. Because that was the sine qua non of creating unconscious memory in culture. And it became comfortable for a lot of people, because most people are in the business of making themselves comfortable.

It takes a historian such as Branch, someone who can comprehend and communicate with an acuity greater than what’s necessary for a Twitter post, to see and say what so many of us seem to have forgotten. In this day and age, with a black family in the White House, many Americans like to believe such a reality was always possible. But that’s viewing history at an arm’s length. The bitter truth is that, hard as it might be to admit, our contemporary reality was a historical impossibility a few decades—years, even—ago.

Branch is best known for his landmark trilogy documenting the civil rights movement. The first of these books, Parting the Waters: American in the King Years, 1954–63, won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize. The successive volumes—Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65 and At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68—garnered near-unanimous acclaim and are must-reads for anyone interested in a comprehensive understanding of the movement that changed this nation from a structurally racist society to one struggling to make peace with its complicated history. Branch’s conversation with James Fallows of The Atlantic at the Aspen Institute coincided with the release of another book by Branch, The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement, which is something of a CliffsNotes version of the other three books.

Fifty years is a long time for Americans who seem to have never embraced—or learned—an accurate story of our racial history. In just a half century this nation has come a long way—from George Wallace to President Barack Obama. Branch reminds all of us—and white Americans in particular—that the nation is truly a better place than it used to be and is worthy of heeding the lessons that this 50-year anniversary heralds.

Or, as Branch so eloquently stated:

Any minority person lives having to stretch themselves across the boundaries because their accepted world is not the accepted world. So Barack Obama is the first elected African American president, but he’s also the one who’s mentioned race least since Dwight Eisenhower. And whenever he does, a storm comes up. If he says his son would’ve looked like Trayvon Martin, the whole world goes nuts, saying that he’s being too black. … So it shows that we are accepting, and we are moving forward, and it is vital, but we’re doing it on our terms, that is, the majority culture is doing it on our terms, and we’re blind to the fact that our unconscious assumptions … our political discourse—antigovernment, in which “big government” is bad, is out of phase with what ought to be a very bracing and optimistic view of what we’ve accomplished in the last 50 years that ought to steel us for the task of again stepping outside our comfort zones and again trying to tackle difficult problems today.

Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.