> On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 4:50 PM, SA<s11131978 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> A good while ago, me and Eric Beck had a disagreement about "Keynesianism."
>> I said that his anti-Keynesian position, if acted on, would have negative
>> real-world consequences. Although I didn't mention it, in practice those
>> consequences would be much worse for blacks than for whites. By the logic of
>> state-of-the-art anti-racism, that would mean Eric's position (in my
>> understanding of how the world works) was racist,
> Of course there are many ways to approach the question, but it's not a
> certainty that it would be worse for blacks. For instance: In 1979,
> 40% of all black children lived below the poverty level; in 2001 the
> number was 30%. So the era of High Neoliberalism saw a rather large
> decrease in African American child poverty levels, ones much, much
> lower than the 65% in 1965, the apex of Keynesianism/Fordism, or even
> 1969, when it was also 40%.
The official poverty rate has fallen for all groups -- white, black, etc. (It has a tendency to do so since it's, unfortunately, an absolute measure.) If the important question is the racial disparity in poverty rates, then the era of neoliberalism has been a setback. The black-white poverty ratio fell strongly and steadily in the 1965-83 period -- from 3.2 to 2.1. Since 1983, it's barely budged -- falling from 2.1 to 1.9.
I can post a chart if anyone's interested, or send it offlist.
SA