Behind virus and protests: A chronic US economic racial gap
WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States has been here before, staring into the chasm that divides white and black Americans.
It happened after cities burned in 1967, after Los Angeles erupted with the 1992 acquittal of police officers who beat Rodney King, after the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
After those upheavals came talk of change — of reforming policing and of expanding economic opportunity to black Americans left behind in one of the world’s richest countries.
Despite high hopes, economic progress has come slowly, if at all, for black Americans. They still earn barely 60 cents for every $1 in white income and have 10 cents in wealth for every $1 whites own.
Now, demonstrators are out in the streets again, this time to protest what happened in Minneapolis to George Floyd, dead after a police officer pressed a knee into his neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds.
Once again, racial inequality underlies rage and despair, especially amid an economic and health calamity that is falling hardest, yet again, on African Americans. “We’ve got a perfect storm,” said Cecelia Rouse, professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University.
Black Americans are far more likely to die of COVID-19 and to work in low-paying service jobs — the ones slashed when restaurants and movie theaters closed as a health precaution.
Black workers who remain employed are more likely to work as front-line workers in warehouses, grocery stores and takeout eateries — jobs that leave them exposed to the virus.
Amid the anger and anguish is optimism that policymakers will use this moment to find ways to narrow the economic gap between black and white Americans, perhaps through paid sick leave, a higher federal minimum wage, maybe even direct...
