The Review of Black Political Economy

The destruction of private and public housing in New Orleans caused by Hurricane Katrina was greatest among African Americans due to historic settlement patterns. Data for 13 planning districts within Orleans Parish (the city of New Orleans proper) that document the extent of housing destruction, the distribution of population by race, and the share of returned population at 2 and 5 year points across these planning districts are evaluated using correlation analysis. The finding is that the return of African Americans to New Orleans is significantly less than that of other groups and is associated with the greater housing destruction in neighborhoods with the highest percentages of African Americans. An analysis of the structure and impact of the Road Home program for private housing and of the initiatives of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Housing Authority of New Orleans provides evidence of racial discriminatory policies and practices that contributed to the racial disparity in the African American return to New Orleans. It is suggested that political leaders paid more attention to the interests of developers and big businesses in the restoration of New Orleans than to the interests of the predominantly black working class in the city.

The U.S. is characterized by a longstanding pattern of large structural racial inequality that deepens further as a result of economic downturn. Although there have been some improvements in the income gap up until around the mid 1970s, the employment gap, and the racial wealth gap - two dramatic indicators of economic security - remains exorbitant and stubbornly persistent. We offer two race-neutral programs that could go a long way towards eliminating racial inequality, while at the same time providing economic security, mobility and sustainability for all Americans. The first program, a federal job guarantee, would provide the economic security of a job and the removal of the threat of unemployment for all Americans. The second program, a substantial child development account that rises progressively based on the familial asset positioning of the child’s parents, would provide a pathways towards asset security for all Americans regardless of their economic position at birth.

Most studies of the demand for private education have treated “white flight” as a response to the proportion of the population that is black in a particular area. The present article, by contrast, considers the possibility that this flight may be from poverty rather than race. The article develops an aggregate demand function for private education from which individual behavior may be inferred, and then applies the model to data from Mississippi. The results suggest that prejudice is directed against poor blacks rather than against nonpoor blacks or poor whites.

This study revisits the issue of racial position segregation or racial “stacking” in intercollegiate football. Estimating a probit model, we examine the impact that a player’s race has on the probability of him changing positions when he moves from high school to the collegiate ranks. Descriptive statistics of our data reveal significant evidence that racial position segregation is widespread in high school football. The data also offers much information about which players are likely to change positions and the positions that they are likely to switch to when transitioning from high school to college. Most notably, our probit results reveal that African American high school quarterbacks and white high school running backs are significantly more likely to change positions in college than their white and African American counterparts, respectively. Thus, while other positions do not appear to become more racially segregated as players transition from high school to college, the quarterback and running back positions do appear to become significantly more racially segregated.

The high unemployment rate of black high school graduates can create the perception that a diploma is of little value and encourage dropping-out of school. Black youth who do drop out are less employable and further push up the black youth unemployment rate. This raises a question: Is the high dropout rate of black youth due to their high unemployment rate or is their high unemployment rate due to their high dropout rate? A study of this question using the definition of Granger-causality finds that it is the high unemployment rate which causes the high dropout rate rather than the opposite.