I took a lot of classes in college that dealt with the perception of race-- it was always kind of a hobby of mine. Maybe it's because I, a Chinese girl, was born in a predominantly white (very small) town in northern California and never realized the extent to which race played a part in everyday life. I can honestly say that, growing up, I never really thought of myself as different from the other kids-- sure sometimes the "bad kids" in class would make fun, but they were often quickly shushed by my friends, my teachers or a quick dodge ball to the throat. (Playground vengeance!) Perhaps it was because we were younger then and we didn't question-- "why are you different looking than me?", but I like to think that it was because of our childlike ignorance that we simply didn't care-- we didn't question why because in our small scope of the world, it simply didn't matter.
When I moved down to southern California when I was 12, things changed. There were suddenly a lot of other Asian people (not just two families like in my old town) and not just Asians-- a lot of other races too! But it wasn't as cohesive as I was used to-- the Korean kids were "KP Kids" (Korean Pride Kids) and flashed "KP" hand signals to each other in a joking (but not really joking) way. The Chinese kids were split between the Americanized ones ("The Twinkies"), the FOBS ("Fresh Off the Boats"), and the CP (you guessed it-- "Chinese Pride") kids. Within the Chinese Pride kids, they subdivided into the Taiwanese kids, the nerdy studiers, the ones who thought they were thugs with the baggy pants and everything-- all leaving their multi-million dollar homes in Turtle Rock every morning. There were a ton of others- Indian kids, Persian (Iranian) kids who were not to be confused with the Arabic kids.
I was ostracized a bit. For the Chinese kids, I wasn't Chinese enough because I preferred to hang out with my best friends who were Persian and White. Growing up, my boyfriends ran the gamut-- Spanish, white, Brazilian, Mexican, Korean and Chinese... but because they weren't always Chinese, I was relegated to Twinkie status. Which is not to say that everyone wasn't nice. It was more of an understanding that I would normally hang out with the mixed or not-all-Asian groups but that I would always be welcome to hang out with the Asian groups if I chose.
So I grow up. And now, I've been noticing an influx of articles about how the recession has really increased the disparity between races. I find it so ironic that growing up, I was essentially color-blind (maybe color-ignorant, since I saw the difference, but just didn't care/know why I should care), I suddenly live in this Utopian place where everyone gets a long (mostly) and now that I'm an "adult" and "mature", race suddenly matters more than ever.
The subprime implosion, for example, has apparently set African Americans back more than normal since they are more typically the customers that started with below-average credit scores to begin with. The flooding of money for mortgage lenders changed all that, and soon, African Americans were one the largest untapped markets. They were able to get loans despite subpar credit and the financial industry simultaneously was spurring home ownership as well as creating jobs and driving the economy. In the words of a Wells Fargo lawyer, "There was a loan for almost anybody who wanted a loan. It was just priced differently based on credit". I want to bring this up with a note of irony, because Wells Fargo is paying $175M to settle allegations of steering customers to high-interest or risky subprime mortgages when they were qualified for a subprime loan due to their credit scores. The ones they steered were predominantly Hispanic or black.
The Pew Research Center estimates that the wealth of blacks declined by 53% during the recession. Supposedly, it goes farther than this and may hint at the racial segregation already in place in financial instruments. In Atlanta, it was reported that black homebuyers paid an average of $700 more in fees to close than their white counterparts with similar profiles. Around this time last year, the data collected by the Census Bureau indicated that the median wealth of Hispanic households fell by 66% between 2005 and 2009, making them the hardest hit group by the recession. Whites fell by 16%, African Americans fell by 53% and Asians fell by 54%. These declines have been noted as the largest wealth disparities in the 25 years that the Bureau has been collecting data. Median wealth of whites is now 20x that of black households and 18x that of Hispanic households.
Research claims that whites now have 2x the consumer power as blacks, due to the "Great Recession". With another potential recession (one that is supposed to be much worse) on the way, how much larger can the disparity grow?
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