Waveney Ann Moore: Equity means access to the whole pie

A new poll lays bare the deep emotional pain and seething frustration being experienced by African Americans.

One has to look no further than the National Urban League’s 2022 State of Black America report, its accompanying Equality Index and the first-time Pulse of Black America poll to understand the widespread distress.

As Americans gather for Easter dinner, sit around the Seder table or break the Ramadan fast at an Iftar dinner, the National Urban League’s Equality Index could provide unsettling food for thought.

So, what is the Equality Index? As the Urban League explains it, economic empowerment is central to the organization’s mission. The index provides a way to document progress toward that mission for Black Americans relative to whites.

This year, the Equality Index of Black Americans is 73.9 percent. “That means that rather than having a whole pie (100%), which would mean full equality with whites in 2022, African Americans are missing about 26% of the pie,” the civil rights organization says.

Despair, even anger, about the current state of affairs is understandable. 

“Even when following the same blueprint of academic and professional achievement outlined by White America, Black Americans feel they are still denied the keys to unlocking longer-term middle-class success,” the Pulse of Black America poll finds.

The Rev. Louis Murphy, pastor of Mount Zion Progressive Missionary Baptist Church, one of St. Petersburg’s largest predominantly African-American congregations, said he’s familiar with the frustration.

“I sense it, experience it. I deal with it all the time,” he told me days after the release of the index, which measures how Black Americans are doing in comparison to whites in the areas of economics, health, education, social justice and civic engagement.

I asked Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, what was most disturbing about this year’s Equality Index. “Black America is facing stress and frustration, but these relative numbers do not move, and if they move, they move with baby steps and the differential does not change,” he said.

Looked at together, the scientifically based index and the opinion poll, “what is clear is that we are now 60 years past the civil rights era and the numbers have not materially changed. And that is a point of frustration,” Morial said. “The second story is that we’re facing an assault on the right to vote.”

In fact, the full title of the organization’s 46th annual assessment is blunt – State of Black America, “Under Siege: The Plot to Destroy Democracy.” The plot, according to the Urban League and its research partner, The Brennan Center for Justice, is one of gerrymandering, voter suppression, misinformation and intimidation.

But there is hope, Morial said. “There is an aware, awoke and energized group of young people and others who are pushing back, in the courts, in state legislatures, and fighting to thwart this.”

The Urban League has issued a “call to action,” he said, to combat the unrelenting backlash being fueled by “those who favor yesterday’s status quo.”

And he challenged, “You can’t say you want freedom for Ukraine and deny the freedom to vote here in the United States.”

The Equality Index did yield some good news. Economic gains for Black Americans have improved, rising from 59.2 percent to 62.8 percent compared to white residents. The poverty gap narrowed.

Such gains in the Black-White economics index, the report said, were “driven mainly by greater equality in Black-White median household incomes — 63% in 2022, up from 58% in 2020, and greater equality in the median earnings of Black women—82%, up from 80% in 2020.”

But the news wasn’t good for Black men, whose median weekly income fell from 73 percent to 72 percent of white men. 

Sadly, more Black children were uninsured. However, there was positive news about diabetes. “The share of African Americans aged 20 or older diagnosed with diabetes decreased from 32.6% to 12.7%, narrowing the racial equity gap by 26 percentage points,” the report said.

In more bad news for Black men, the death rate from prostate cancer nearly tripled, “widening the racial equity gap by six percentage points.” 

When asked whether there’s an area in the country where Blacks are doing better than the Equality Index, Morial pointed to the Washington, D.C., area. 

“You will find a higher Black income. There’s a higher concentration of college-educated Black people,” he said. “Because of the federal government, Black people were able to hold professional jobs.” 

The Equality Index also showed a widening in the gap of Black home ownership compared to whites.

Locally, Black leaders have been addressing some of the very issues being measured by the index. Murphy belongs to the Collective Empowerment Group of the Tampa Bay Area, whose mission is to “Bring Black Communities from Health to Wealth.”

“One of our initiatives is to create wealth and to continue to come up with ways and processes to help people with home ownership,” he said.

There are well-known obstacles.

“In some cases, you have folk who are outside of the city coming in and offering people cash money for their homes, especially elderly people. But you also have a situation where it can be somewhat out of reach for a young couple, because of the rise in real estate. Now it’s getting to the point where they can’t even rent,” the pastor said.

He mentioned the need for financial literacy.

“And people need help, as well, especially people in the workforce. Young couples with two or three children,” he said. “Hopefully, we will keep pushing for legislation to make that happen. There has to be help from the government.”

St. Petersburg’s first Black mayor, Ken Welch, has pledged to increase affordable housing and address some of the very racial disparities evident in the Equality Index. 

Morial, a former mayor of New Orleans, is aware of the challenges Welch will face. He spoke of his late father, Ernest N. “Dutch” Morial, who elected the first Black mayor of New Orleans when the city had a slight white majority.

“He is going to have a lot of pressure and he’s also going to have the old guard status quo battling him, as well as those who want him to make progress,” Morial said of Welch. “I lived those experiences. There are those who will try to stop him from succeeding.”

Supporters will “have to be both aggressive and patient at the same time,” he said. “The mayor doesn’t have magical power. The mayor has power, but no magic wand.”