TheLoop21.com

By: Michael E. Ross (Add to your loop)
Sat, 02/28/2009 - 01:00

With Barack Obama and the State of the Black Union, anything is possible.

When Tavis Smiley inaugurated the State of the Black Union tradition in 2000, there were about 35.3 million black Americans, just under 13 percent of the national population of 281.4 million people. Black Americans had a median family income of $31,778, while 78.5 percent were high school graduates, and 16.5 percent had at least bachelor’s degree from college, according to the Statistical Abstract of the United States 2001.

That snapshot of black progress preceded grim news on the political front: the bitterly contested 2000 “hanging chad” presidential election would lead to the equally bitter suspicion of voter disenfranchisement, and the sense among blacks and others that the election had been stolen by reactionary forces hostile to minority advancement in the United States.

The 10^th anniversary of the State of the Black Union takes place in a profoundly different nation — and a nation much the same. Today, there are some 41 million black Americans, about 13 percent of a national population that’s now 306 million. Blacks have a median family income of $38,269; 82.3 percent of blacks are high school graduates and 18.5 percent have at least a bachelor’s degree from college, according to the latest statistical abstract.

That snapshot of black social and economic achievement occurs in a country now under the stewardship of the first black president in the nation’s history.

It’s a tale not of two nations, but of two eras for the same nation. For African Americans in 2009, the theme of this year’s conference — “Making America as Good as its Promise” — couldn’t be more timely or resonant.

With Barack Obama as president, and a refocus of national energies on domestic concerns set to begin in earnest, the state of black America is in a state of flux never seen before. The face of the new administration will by default elevate the visibility of the black experience on the national stage. And Obama’s Cabinet and body of advisers, easily the most racially and ethnically integrated in history, is a symbolic indication that the Obama administration understands the importance of addressing minority concerns — including health care and education — in the wider national context.

But the Obama crew inherits an economy whose decline has come close to being an equal opportunity destroyer, with a host of the challenges facing black America — rampant unemployment, inaccessibility to loans, plummeting home values — again not so different from those facing the nation as a whole.

The difference? It’s as much contemporary as it is historical: When the nation gets a cold, black Americans contract something worse. The weight of economic forces now hitting families of all ethnicities is something black people have had to contend with for decades.

The Black State of the Union symposium — what The Los Angeles Sentinel called “the preeminent conversation of thought leaders and Black opinion makers throughout the nation” — comes back this year to Los Angeles, its birthplace, with the United States facing challenges and opportunities no one might have imagined in 2000. This year, maybe more than ever, the symposium’s role as a sounding board for the concerns of African Americans assumes its most fully representative dimension, as a mirror for the challenges and opportunities facing all Americans.

Michael E. Ross, a frequent contributor to TheLoop21.com, is a West Coast journalist who blogs frequently on politics, pop culture and race matters at Culchavox. He also writes for The Root and PopMatters.

Is Obama compromising too much in the health care bill?

Yes, we need public option

No, he's keeping the peace

Republicans will block it anyway

Let's wait until the health care summit

I don't know