Well apparently all the medians are doing better than me. My net worth is like -$20k.

Yeah, when you're able to be lumped with the top 1% who own 40% of the wealth, it sure feels great!

Yet another example of the evil white man ruining the world.

For fuck's sake Mudede, is there anything you can look at without seeing race? Did it ever occur to your addled mind that things would be better if people stopped giving so much attention to race and treated people the same no matter what color they are? The fact that the recession pretty much sucks for everyone and we should work on fixing that instead of bitching about how much more it sucks for me because of what color I am?

For a Marxist, that's a pretty dumb thing to say...

Tell it to all the white people who aren't sending their kids to summer camp on private jets. Thank Buddha I have a job, but i haven't been paid my full salary for 3 years.

Don't listen to these cracker pieces of shit. This is a good article.

I figured this blog would inflame people. Recession sucks for just about everyone. But sadly, a lot of people have difficulty using a sociological perspective to consider how some people have the cards stacked tremendously against them due to institutional racism and what not. Charles isn’t making this up.

Yay! No recession because I'm white! I'm in the money! I'm in the money! I'm in the money! ... Wait. Well, fuck me. I have a net worth of something like -10K. Where can I get some of this $$ I supposedly have? Cause my two jobs and occasional temp work isn't adding up to the 100K+ my fellow whites are apparently enjoying.

They may be interesting numbers and numbers that are indicative of a trend but ultimately they're just numbers. I'm poor and suffering from a bad economy. So are some of my friends. Some of them are white. And some of my friends who aren't poor aren't white. So numbers can give a general picture but they say fuck all about an individual's situation.

wow. this is news to which we should all be paying attention. too bad all this hate for charles makes you blind to it. if someone else posted to slog i doubt the debate would have gone this way. that's racism for you.

Shut the fuck up, Doom. Pew is eminent and respectable. "Think for yourself" in your case means "listen to the voices in your back teeth".

People who think "oh, hey, I'm poor too" don't understand what's happening in the black community. The recession here is a depression there. And all of this "la la, I don't see anything, I see no color" BS just perpetuates it.

Some of you need to read the whole article. it's not all about white wealth. it's about wealth that blacks and latinos have lost....

"From 2005 to 2009, inflation-adjusted median wealth plunged two-thirds among Hispanic households and 53% among black households, compared with just 16% for white households."

@grape_ape: Yeah, when you're able to be lumped with the top 1% who own 40% of the wealth, it sure feels great!

@sgt_doom: There are 9 multi-billionaires living in Seattle proper --- guess how that skews the stats, dood?

God damn it, median is not mean. Take an f-ing stats class.

This, exactly: "So numbers can give a general picture but they say fuck all about an individual's situation." (@11)

It's a big, lazy leap from institutionalized racism, which is very real, to saying "You are not in a recession". You're ignoring class and gender.

Unless blacks take responsibility for their own destructive attitudes/behavior they'll always be at the the bottom. Easier to blame whitey than look at your own graduation, incarceration, and illegitimacy rates.

@ 18 FTW.

@13, What I took offense to was Charles's blase "Reality Check for White People: You are not in a recession". Some white people are. I'm one of them.
I think it's eye-opening to know that blacks and latinos have taken a much larger economic hit than whites. I think it's good to have numbers on it. And I think racism is a problem. You know what else is a problem? Painting entire ethnic or cultural groups with a broad fucking brush.

one can point out that the absurdly wealthy oligarch caucasians (who wouldn't piss on a poor or working class caucasian if they were on fire) skew these statistics without being a "cracker piece of shit".

Median is certainly an interesting method to use here. The numbers seem mostly a statement about the difference in home ownership between races. If over half of white people own homes you'll easily get up into the 100K median. If less than half of black people own homes you won't see a home price in the wealth number.

@15 I wonder why with a title of "Reality Check for White People" and a first line saying "You are not in a recession" everyone thought you were talking about how white people aren't having problems.

@13 It would have gone exactly this way. Consider it judging him not based on the color of his skin, but the content of his ill-conceived post.

You of all people should know the dangers of generalizing. Just as not all minorities are the same, so the same is true for those of European descent. You're right about the broad averages, but don't think that doesn't mean a diverse group of Americans are suffering right now.

With the difference in income between the average front-line worker and upper management racing into numbers that look more like astronomy than finance, of course any median that involves CEO's is going to skew.

Yes, this is a serious indictment about the access that non-whites (don't) have to extreme wealth, but it doesn't say what you think it says about white people in general.

The average white family is not likely to be 20 times more wealthy than the average black family, nor does that say a damn thing about how the recession is hitting lower class whites.

The longer you stayed in school, the more likely you are to still have your job. I'd imagine employment goes a lot toward contributing to total wealth.

Some of you want to shoot the messenger. A black perspective is a crucial thing to hear if we're ever going to learn to listen and listen to learn, not just react.

Oh and:

"Nearly two-thirds of Hispanics’ median net worth in 2005 came from home equity, according to the report, and when the housing market collapsed, so did their wealth. Median home equity for Hispanics fell by 51 percent in the period of the survey. The drop was compounded by the fact that Hispanics tended to live in the places that were hit hardest in the recession, like Florida and California, the report said. "

So a lot of the "wealth" was inflated home value.

@ 30, see @ 26.

Charles isn't getting shit because of the report he linked (which is a good one and does give a crucial perspective you don't see enough), but because of his lazy and/or deliberately provocative presentation.

There are way, way too many variables to draw any significant conclusions from this report. Well, unless the conclusion is that white people, on average, have more money than blacks and hispanics. But if that conclusion surprises you, then I suppose you haven't been paying attention for about 200 years.

Net worth is also not really that significant. It's not like that money is excess just laying around. Owning homes, cars, land, as opposed to renting will offset that a lot, too.

Oh and $113k isn't very much money either. It's more than $5k, but we're all essentially broke, considering that many of these people have been working 20-30 years to amass a tiny nest-egg which, all told, is just a year or two's buffer from $0.

The only thing that's surprising about this is that Charles seems to think that it's meaningful...

Hey Charles, black people don't generally make as much money, or save as much, as white people. Write that down. Make a post-it and put it on your wall. That way, next time you see one of these articles, you won't be so fucking surprised.

#2 has it right. A relatively small number of the incredibly wealthy are dragging the white average way up. It's not about race - its just the standard rich getting richer and poor getting poorer*. It just so happens that nearly all of the richest of the rich are white.

*Thanks Republicans!

If there were a criticism to make of Charles' post, it'd be that minorities and poor whites aren't in a recession, they are in a depression. But, Charles knows very well that some white folks are hurting badly. His humorous title does point to the lack of empathy of many, overwhelmingly white people, including a fair share of "liberals", whose living standard is modestly affected by the recession and who appear to believe that cuts into the social safety net, education, etc.. are necessary evils.

Members of congress (or Slog writers) must demand that that white people's money must be given back to the blacks and hispanics, and the lands of California, Arizona and Oregon must also be handed back to the Mexicans. Seattle must change its name to Chief Sealth, and we also must stop using spoons, forks, and soap! Act now!

I dare you to contrast mean income, rather than median. I'm sure that there will still be a disparity, but it won't be nearly as huge. The fact that there are many more white millionaires and billionaires than there are rich people of color skews the median much higher than what your average whitey makes.

So Charles, do you believe one's race is one's destiny? Blacks are completely at the mercy of whites? If you're black, there's no point in trying because white people will keep you down?

That's the kind of prophecy that tends to fulfill itself.

@15: Interesting - any speculation as why Latinos and blacks were hit hardest by the recession? For example, are they over-represented in the real estate industry?

You people don't know how median works. You could take all of the billionaires out of the county and these numbers wouldn't change by a penny.

Fnarf, explain. The median separates the higher half of the sample from the lower half. If you're taking data out of the higher half, the midpoint moves down (since only half can remain above the midpoint), unless I completely misremember how math works.

Fnarf, Charles can play these games, but you don't need to say dumb things to get a rise out of people, too.

God, those numbers are horrifying. As usual, Charles pokes at the masses, but there is truth in this. While there are many individual whites who have been hit hard by the recession, it's not at the same near universal level as blacks and Latinos.

If you can't be bothered to follow the link and understand what they're talking about, this blog post simplifies it: http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/201…

A quarter of Hispanics and Blacks have no assets other than a vehicle, compared to 6% of Whites. And 35% of Black and 31% of Hispanic households had negative median net worth in 2009, with their debts outweighing all of their assets; this was true of only 15% of White non-Hispanics.

This isn't about the top 1%. Not even close.

Fnarf received his doctorate in I Understand Medians, Stop Being Mean in 1970 at Kent State University.

@43 - he most certainly does.

Though the report does take into account assets and their value, there are also many reports discussing the link between subprime mortgages and the propensity of banks to offer these loans disparately to minorities... check The Center for Responsible Lending website cites several studies done to indicate this fact:
Wells Fargo Faulted for Record on Failed…

"Community groups complained that Wells Fargo has long targeted minorities for subprime loans and rejected their applications for conventional mortgages, with a report from National People's Action revealing that African-American and Latino borrowers accounted for one-quarter of the lender's $47.5 billion high-cost refinancing business but just 11 percent of its lending volume."

@15

Charles:"Some of you need to read the whole article. it's not all about white wealth. it's about wealth that blacks and latinos have lost...."

Well, then why the fuck frame it like"White people are not in a Recession"? Look. I agree. Black people are getting the serious shaft. Even WITH our groovy black president. But you know what? So is everybody who isn't in the upper 6%.

White people are not in a recession? This is demonstrably not true. Again stop lumping people all together into one monolithic demographic mass and then use that to clumsily retrofit your strawmen worldviews so you can cut and past another pre-drawn conclusion. It's lazy as hell.

You hate it when the likes of FOX news does it. It's no better when you do it. Deal?

It's so bizarre to hear white people complaining about people of color making distinctions on the basis of race and ethnicity. In case you never learned, it wasn't African Americans who wrote 3/5 of a person into the Constitution. Or who wrote the Fugitive Slave Laws and Jim Crow laws and anti-miscegination laws. It wasn't Asian Americans who expelled the Chinese and put the Japanese in detention camps. It wasn't Native Americans who banished themselves to reservations.

All of these distinctions were drawn by white people to protect their precious privileges and for their own economic gain.

And to deny that these policies--some centuries old--have lasting impacts today is not only to have your head up your ass, it is to lack any understanding of the human condition.

I find it appalling that we even have to read comments like these. Go back to Norway, where you can live out your white supremacist fantasies.

@51 I am white. I did not write those policies. I did not vote for the people who did. Those laws are terrible and have a lasting effect. That does not negate the offensiveness of Mr. Mudede's opening to his post. Does his full article have a good point? Sure. Does that excuse his opening? No.

Fnarf is right, and the median Slog 'tater is an idiot.

Kick 100 billionaires out of a population of 100 million, and the median moves 50 places down the line - to somebody with the same net worth to the nearest dollar (with probability approaching 1).

And whites are in a depression - the kind of thing that pushes the lower rungs of the economic ladder (and the minorities who live on those rungs) under water.

It's true that racism is the problem, but much of it is internalized racism. Many minorities use the fact that they live in a racist country as an excuse not to try or strive for anything better, so it becomes a vicious cycle of self-defeatism. If you did a statistical breakdown of single-parent households by race, Hispanic and black people would come out on top.

@51 Interesting. Now everybody who disagrees with one element of this article in 2011 is not only responsible for laws written over 70 years ago but is also a Viking Nazi.

Boy. That type of thinking sure sounds familiar. Let's see:

Generalize and stereotype based on past ancestry? CHECK.
Remove nuance from discussion rely instead on emotional argument? CHECK.
Strawman? CHECK.
Use the old "Love it or leave it" or "Go back to where you came from" argument? CHECK.

Excellent. You have now passed the The Klan entrance exam!

@52,@55: I'm sure you two are doing plenty to correct the economic and legal bondage that keeps the modern lower-class (esp. minorities) in place. Just because the hate laws aren't as explicit doesn't make current policies and your complacency any less dangerous. Expressing more outrage when people point out Elite White America's history of chokeholding prosperity for everyone else, rather than the real offense, prove their divide and conquer strategy works. It's always easier to blame the victims, than fight the system.

@56 Does working with underprivileged youth from a wide verity of races as my primary vocation for several years count? Or am I now a condescending privileged white who is doing that to just make himself feel better? Probably as far as you are concerned. Generalizations are bad. Generalizations about race are really bad. The author made one. It does not help his otherwise valid point. Please respond to my post and not your generalized assumptions about me with no facts or knowledge to back them up.

Using median instead of mean is an example of a technique in rhetoric called "lying with statistics". It implies that white people are rich, when instead the very very different truth is that most very very very rich people are white. These are completely different things, and not understanding the difference is a sign of malice or stupidity. Most likely both.

Ugh. The "I don't have privilege, I'm suffering too!" comments are disgusting. When you ignore and minimize the institutional racism that benefits you as a white person, you are perpetuating it.

For heaven's sakes, @58 and others. As several above have pointed out, outliers will skew a mean much more than a median. For example, if your data are:

0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 100

...then the mean is about 12, while the median is 1. So a few white billionaires would surely make the white mean much higher than the white median.

And @57 and others, making observations about structural injustice isn't a "bad" generalization about race, the way a stereotype would be. It's a truth reflecting our social history. Of course it doesn't describe every person's experience. But a real trend is indicative of something real. Just like, if I were to point out that women still earn 77 cents for each dollar than men earn in the U.S., it would not be very helpful to remind me that Oprah earns tons of money, or that you personally know several men who are quite penniless.

Jesus Christ. Is there lead in the water in Seattle? There is more going on here than an average, no matter how you slice the average. You idiots need to open your eyes and look at the entire issue, beyond one striking quote.

Percentage of the population who have no assets other than a car:
Non-Hispanic Whites: 6%
Blacks: 25%
Hispanics: 25%

Percentage of households with negative median net worth in 2009, with their debts outweighing all of their assets:
Non-Hispanic Whites: 15%
Blacks: 35%
Hispanics: 31%

@62 "Jesus Christ. Is there lead in the water in Seattle? There is more going on here than an average, no matter how you slice the average. You idiots need to open your eyes and look at the entire issue, beyond one striking quote."

Nobody is arguing that black people are NOT getting fucked over. Nobody who isn't a troll,, anyway. Though anybody that doesn't perfectly align with your guilt ridden word view you lump them all together, right? Hows that working out for you?

Of course when you have a legacy of 400 years of getting fucked over, any down turn is going to be significantly worse for you. This is not a surprise. It's as predictable as it is tragic.

But it absolutely does not add to a conversation or argument to frame a post sensationalisticly or divisively. It's poisoning the well right off the bat. Which is what Charles is doing with the headline. It's horseshit.

It's not the best strategy to lead a discussion on income disparity with the implied charge that one group shouldn't complain because other people have it so much worse. It's the rhetorical equivalent of saying "eat your peas, there are starving children in China." It's not a convincing argument. It's deliberately insulting.

There my be lead in the water in Seattle. But at least it hasn't interfered with my knowledge of the facts of history.

And fucking no where in the history of this planet has anybody willingly given up their privilege to another less fortunate group when EVERY group, but the narrowest elite ruling class, is rapidly diminishing in power. People hold on to their shit like grim death.

You want the average white guy to actually help? Accurately identify to them the people who have the REAL power and REAL wealth and build collective alliances to retrieve our SHARED rights and SHARED resources back from them.

As long as you make this a zero-sum argument good luck changing anything.

If the idea is to simply alert white people to their privileged in the most most shrill way possible. Great. Mission accomplished. You have preached to the converted.

If the idea of this post is to convince white people to willingly give up some of their privileges to help other less advantaged people. Fail.

Why the fuck should some lower-income white guy give up his ever shrinking share of the pie to somebody else when that action is not even remotely recognized as the sacrifice it would most certainly be?

Oh. Because of a legacy of institutional racism. I see. It may be true but it won't change shit.

Look. I consistently use my vote AND my checkbook to try to right social wrongs. Not because of what my ancestors did but because I want to help people. Most people want to help other people if given a fair chance and a little credit. Nobody is asking for a medal. Just to be cut some rhetorical slack.

What some of you seem to do is consistently shit on people BECAUSE OF WHO THEIR ANCESTORS WERE before they even have a chance to help you. The irony is delicious.

Most people react emotionally to that. Even me. And I AGREE with you.

My default reaction to having my the superficial perception of my ancestry thrown in my face - guilt by association - repeatedly is to toss up my hands and just say: Fine. Fuck you, then. I got mine, motherfuckers. I can't beat the rich people. And I can't get credit for trying. So fuck you. Go ahead and starve. I may not be able to send my kids to college but at least I can put food on the table.

It's an ugly reaction. And it's perfectly natural. And easily avoided.

But. Hey. Keep doing what your doing. It really seems to be helping.

@59: It's more like "I do have privilege and I'm suffering too."

@51: The 3/5 compromise was about how much power slave states would have in the House of Representatives. It was the opponents of slavery who wanted that number to be 3/5 instead of 1, because then the slave states would have fewer representatives. It has nothing to do with how much people are worth. Putting that 3/5 in helped end slavery.

Wow. Nice to know that my years of un- and underemployment have NOT been due to a recession.

We should not be calling it "white privilege." That's not what it is. A "privilege" is something that people don't deserve and should have taken away. If it were called "stuff that whites have that everyone ought to have" then there would be a lot more white people going "That's right!"

And THAT'S what's wrong with this post. If Mr. Mudede had said "The recession has been worse for blacks and Hispanics than it has been for whites," I'd have said "That sucks, gotta see what we can do about that," but I wouldn't have been offended. But instead he said "Whites are not in a recession," which is BS.

Look at it this way:

TRUE: "Irish immigrants had a hard time in the U.S., but African slaves suffered much more than they did."

BEING A JERK: "African slaves suffered the most. No one else's experience counts."

No, DRF, you haven't quite got it yet. It's more like "stuff that whites have that everyone else could have if they could just stop shitting in their own nest."

My critique of these stats is from another angle -- the use of racial categories in itself is deeply flawed. Usually the "race" is factored in "among those who identified their race." Meanwhile, over the last decade or so more and more people who answer surveys are leaving that question blank or define themselves as "multiracial" or "Other" or "none of the above." Last time I checked, the second most common racial category among UW students is "no answer." The latest US Census allows people to identify themselves with many races as they want to. These boundaries tend to fall apart when you put too much pressure on them.

Besides, shouldn't we be destroying these stupid, archaic, arbitrary categories instead of reinforcing them? Even if we keep them, surely there are more nuanced categories than "white." I'm sure Arab Americans, who are considered "white" on most equal opportunity forms, would be surprised to learn that they are part of the most privileged race in the country.

Shouldn't working class people of every color be opposed to federal policies that engender and accelerate income inequality? While I respect what the authors of the paper have accomplished, given the tenuous nature of class-identity in this country, sociologists should categorically shift from race-based to class-based analyses. We can't change history but we can promote more class-identification and voting for one's economic interests. Studies and articles that mainly serve to piss off white people unfortunately contribute to divisions amongst people who should be banding together for shared economic interests. Racism sucks and it is everywhere. But policies that shift income to rich people of any color (though of course they are mostly white) hurt all working class and poor people (who tend to be of color). We can argue over how we all ended up where we are on the hierarchy or we can come together to advocate for policies that address the hierarchy itself.

PS Slavery sucked and was extremely immoral. Racism sucks and is immoral. But extreme socioeconomic inequality is immoral in its own right. Unfortunately too many people, in part because of articles like this, associate inequality with racism to the extent that inequality is assumed to be bad because racism is bad. That leaves little wiggle room to advocate for policies purely on an equality basis. Especially if you are a GOP politician who denies racism or race -- then you can happily accept or enhance inequality as a market byproduct with no moral component.

@69: Hmm? No, a privilege is not something bad that should be taken away. I have privileges for being white and male, and that's not a bad thing. I have the privilege of being born to wealthy parents with graduate degrees, which isn't a bad thing either. What's bad is that racism and sexism exist and that people suffer because of that.