As the recession continues to take its toll, many Black Americans find themselves almost back at square one.
When Cole and Tracey Wallace purchased their home in Maryland’s Prince George’s County, the achievement of home ownership marked a giant step in their plan to become another All-American family in one of the wealthiest majority Black counties in the nation.
The five-bedroom, 3,000-square-foot home, situated on a cul-de-sac and backed by a golf course in the fashionable Lake Arbor area of Bowie, cost $450,000 in August 2007.
A stretch, yes, even after their down payment. Still, the Prince George’s real estate market was on a fast uptick and home buying there, as was the case in most of the nation earlier this decade, seemed like a smart investment for building wealth. The Wallaces’ income could support the $3,600 house note and household expenses. The house had plenty of room for their growing family and space for them to unwind after getting home from their jobs, his in the hotel business and hers in government.
Today, a national economy gone bust has derailed the Wallace family’s ambitious plans and those of millions of Blacks across the country. Gone are many of the economic gains, small as they were, achieved in the postsegregation era by millions of 1960s generation children and their children. Black America today is beset by job losses, business closures, pay cuts, furloughs, investment and savings losses, nose-diving home values and losses of homes and cars.
As important, the economic shakeout has rede fined the landscape ahead, as established ways of getting ahead — undergraduate and graduate degrees — and the infrastructure that nurtured it — affirmative action and diversity programs — have been turned on their heads. Thousands of high-income, white-collar jobs in the services industries, foundations and education have been eliminated. Diversity programs have been moved down the priority list of many employers. The gains of a whole era and the optimism that fed it have vanished.
“The recession has exposed our vulnerability,” says Hugh C. Burroughs, a consultant to foundations. “We’re not as secure or as strong as we think.”
