Real Talk | Lifting the veil on racial oppression in C-U – News-Gazette.com

Drive through the North End and other largely Black neighborhoods in Champaign-Urbana, and the deep-rooted poverty and extreme racial disparities jump out at you.

You will not see major supermarkets, high-end shopping centers, restaurants, government offices or large employers. You will observe numerous vacant lots, an abundance of boarded-up and substandard houses mainly rental properties and several apparently unemployed men standing on corners and lolling about in parking lots.

That Black neighborhoods in C-U are characterized by concentrated poverty is easily discernable. So, too, are the great disparities in wealth between Black and White neighborhoods. Yet the depth of Black impoverishment and the extent of the racial gaps are not as obvious. Because Black neighborhoods are secreted away in the inner city, they and their conditions are largely invisible to those traveling the regions main thoroughfares. Therefore, the extensiveness of Black folks socioeconomic deprivation is largely cloaked from the view of most C-U residents and visitors.

Well, 24/7 Wall St., a financial news and opinion company, has lifted the veil. In the words of Parliament, the quintessential funk band, they tore the roof off the sucker.

On March 1, senior editor Grant Suneson released an updated list of the worst places for Black people to live in the United States. Out of the countrys 383 metropolitan regions, C-U ranks 20th. Lets meditate on that for a moment.

24/7 Wall St. used 2019 statistical data from the U.S. Census Bureaus American Community Survey, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics to construct its rankings. Its analysts built evaluative criteria based on eight quality-of-life indicators that measure racial disparities in unemployment, poverty, high school and college education, income, homeownership, mortality, and incarceration rates between Black and White residents in each of the 383 metropolitan areas.

The statistical differences in these eight indicators between Black and White people in C-U are enormous. Race-based discrepancies in C-U far exceed those throughout the country and in the state. Nationally, Black median households earned $45,870, or just 61 percent, of the White, not Hispanic median household yearly income of $74,912. In C-U, however, White households $61,910 median income is nearly double that of Black households $31,406.

In 2019, the nationwide unemployment rate for Black people was 6.1 percent; for White people, it was 3.3 percent. In C-U, the rates were 10.9 percent and 3.7 percent, respectively. In other words, while on a national level, Black folk experienced unemployment 1.8 times greater than White people, in C-U it was 2.9 times greater!

The national poverty rate for Black people in 2019 was a little more than 19 percent, compared with 10.3 percent for white people. In Illinois, Black folks poverty rate was 24.8 percent, while White peoples was 9.3 percent. However, in Champaign, during the same period, Black people had a poverty rate of 34.2 percent. Urbanas rate was slightly less than Champaigns at 33.8 percent but still much higher than the state and national averages.

Nationally, Black folks homeownership rate in 2019 was a little more than 41 percent. Meanwhile, slightly more than 73 percent of White Americans owned their homes. For a century, the homeownership gap between Black and white people ranged between 20 and 30 percentage points, but in 2019, it ballooned to 32 percentage points. Yet even the highest national racial homeownership gap pales in comparison to C-Us. At 64.7 to 24.4 percent, White folks own homes at nearly three times the rate of Black people. Moreover, its an immense 40.3-percentage-point difference!

Homeownership has tremendous ramifications for individuals and communities. It creates neighborhood stability, which translates into greater civic engagement and individual educational success.

According to the Urban Institute, youth who live in a crowded household anytime before age 19 are less likely to graduate high school and have lower educational attainment at age 25. The institute also discovered that people who experience being behind on rent, moving multiple times and being without a home also suffer greater health adversities.

Black folk in C-U experience extensive concentrated poverty and extreme racial inequalities. C-Us Black population is quite a bit worse off than the rest of the state and nation.

Black folk in the twin cities are experiencing a multigenerational crisis. Gun violence is but a visible symptom of the deeply rooted socioeconomic crises that batter and bludgeon C-Us Black communities. Alleviating the cause of systematic anti-Black racial oppression should be the priority of C-Us governmental bodies, churches, social-welfare agencies and social-movement organizations.

This will require truly innovative thinking and bold action.

Our northern neighbor Evanston offers a model. Among local reparations initiatives, Evanstons is a bright shining star. There, the city council acknowledged the citys role in historic racial oppression. It launched the Restorative Housing Program and funded it by taxing the citys cannabis retailers. The initiative aims to revitalize, preserve and stabilize African American homeownership. The program establishes a vehicle for Black folk to build intergenerational wealth.

Certainly, its underfunded, but even so, Evanston has established a potentially transformative blueprint.

Like our self-emancipated ancestors, let us follow the North Star.

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Real Talk | Lifting the veil on racial oppression in C-U - News-Gazette.com