Color Less Likely to Own Cars
Less Able to Escape Hurricanes
are insufficient funds in the great vaults of
opportunity of this nation.
—Dr. Martin Luther King, 1963
A new report considers one factor in the
shocking racial disparities revealed by Hurricane Katrina: car
The report (online at http://www.FairEconomy.org/Stalling,
embargoed until January 10) finds that people of color are
considerably more likely to be left behind in a natural disaster,
since fewer of them own cars compared to whites. In
addition, lower rates of car ownership put them at an economic
The report finds that:
Only 7% of white households, but 24% of
black households and 17% of Latino (Hispanic) households owned no
vehicle in 2000.
In all 11 major cities that have had
five or more hurricanes in the last 100 years (Houston, Miami,
Fort Lauderdale, Orlando, Jacksonville, St. Petersburg, Tampa, New
York City, Providence, Boston, and New Orleans), people without
cars are disproportionately people of color.
In the case of a mandatory evacuation
order during a disaster, 33% of Latinos, 27% of African Americans,
and 23% of whites say that lack of transportation would be an
obstacle preventing them from evacuating, according to the
National Center for Disaster Preparedness.
Evacuation planning tends to focus on
traffic management for those with cars and on institutionalized
people, not on non-institutionalized people without vehicles. New
Orleans had only one-quarter the number of buses that would have
been needed to evacuate all carless residents.
the counties affected by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma in
2005, only 7% of white households have no car, compared with 24%
of black, 12% of Native American and 14% of Latino households.
stereotype that black people own expensive cars is inaccurate.
In fact, their median car value is half (or less) of whites,
according to the Federal Reserve.
Eleven percent of African-American families
and 21 percent of Latino families have missed out on medical
care because of transportation issues, compared to only 2
percent of white families, according to the National Center for
The median net worth of white families
increased about 6% after inflation from 2001 to 2004, to $136,000,
while the black median stayed unchanged at $20,000, according to
the Federal Reserve.
Transportation is the second biggest
expense for American households, after housing, according to the
Surface Transportation Policy Project.
Overall, there is a correlation between vehicle
ownership and economic prosperity. Cars give access to wider
choices of jobs, entrepreneurial opportunities and healthcare.
Many small businesses require a vehicle, such as gardening and
The report concludes that car ownership is a
vital part of the American Dream. However, the solution is not
simply to provide all residents with their own cars. The
report suggests improvements in public transportation and disaster
planning, as well as narrowing the racial wealth divide to enable
more car purchases.
One of the report¹s co-authors, Emma Dixon,
went without electricity in her Louisiana home for a week after
Hurricane Katrina. The others, Meizhu Lui and Betsy
Leondar-Wright, are also co-authors of the forthcoming book The
Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the US Racial Wealth Divide
(New Press, 2006). All work for United for a Fair Economy.
"Stalling the Dream" is the third
annual Martin Luther King Day report from United for a Fair
Economy, following State of the Dream 2004 and 2005.
United for a Fair Economy is a national
non-partisan, non-profit organization that raises awareness of the
dangers of growing economic inequality.
* * *
Stalling the Dream
By Meizhu Lui
Fifty years ago, the late Rosa Parks refused to
give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, catalyzing
Imagine, however, if Rosa Parks had lived in
New Orleans in September 2005 and was trying to escape from the
gathering clouds of Hurricane Katrina. Would she have jumped in
her car? Would she have bought a train ticket? It is
likely she wouldn¹t have found any bus seat. Would she have
In light of Hurricane Katrina, millions of
Americans were forced to make such nerve-racking calculations.
And their transportation options, unfortunately, depended on race.
Those with cars largely escaped. But African-American and
Latino households are much less likely than white families to own
a car, leaving us with those indelible images of people of color
crying out from the rooftops.
A great deal of attention in the last two
decades has been focused on the ³digital divide,² the concern
that unequal access to new forms of technology such as the
internet are leaving people behind based on their class and race.
But Hurricane Katrina exposed the "internal combustion
engine" divide, the alarming disparity in car ownership that
literally was the difference between life and death for many Gulf
A new report on racial disparities in car
ownership reveals that one in four Black households (24 percent)
and one in six Latino households (17 percent) does not own a car.
This is compared to one in fourteen white households (7 percent)
who are car-less. In the eleven coastal counties with the highest
incidence and future risk of hurricanes, people without cars are
disproportionately people of color. These include counties
in Houston, Providence, New Orleans, Tampa, New York City and
Miami. In Orleans Parish New Orleans, for example, over 35
percent of African-Americans, 26 percent of Native Americans, and 27 percent of Latinos
don¹t own a car, compared to 15 percent of whites.
Emergency planning for Katrina and other
preparedness efforts is heavily focused on traffic management for
those who have cars. There are also some publicly funded
emergency evacuation plans for people in institutions such as
hospitals, nursing homes and mental health facilities. But
there is inadequate planning for those who simply don¹t own cars.
New Orleans had only one-quarter of the number of buses required
to evacuate all its car-less residents.
Beyond being able to save one's life, owning a
car is often a stepping-stone toward job security and prosperity.
Unfortunately, the invisible ³engine² divide also influences a
person¹s ability to find and retain a decent job. Without a car,
many jobs are unreachable, and many small business ideas are
unachievable. A growing number of jobs are located outside of
urban centers on freeway beltways and in suburban communities,
areas with weak or nonexistent public transportation.
The challenge for many people of color is not
only owning a car, but having a dependable car. A twenty-year old
car used for short city trips is not a dependable vehicle for a
hundred-mile journey to higher ground or a 30 minute daily
commute to a job in the suburbs. People of color tend to own
cheaper and less dependable cars. Contrary to the stereotype
of the Cadillac owning African American, at no time since 1992 has
the median car value for people of color been even half as high as
the value of cars owned by white families.
Access to a vehicle is also essential for
meeting the basic necessities of life, such as obtaining medical
care or buying groceries, especially in rural areas. A
recent national study by the Children¹s Health Fund found that
lack of transportation was a leading factor in children missing
doctor¹s appointments. Eleven percent of African-American
families and 21 percent of Latino families missed out on medical
care because of transportation issues, compared to only 2 percent
of white families.
Dependence on car ownership takes a big bite
out of a family budget. Americans now spend 38 percent more on
transportation than Europeans. For example, Detroit spends
twice as much as Toronto on its roads and Toronto spent eight
times more than Detroit on public transit. As a result,
Detroit ³motor city² residents spent more than twice as much as
their Toronto counterparts on transportation, including the cost
of car ownership and insurance, repairs and gas.
The "engine" divide is rooted in two
larger problems: the bias toward the private automobile in
transportation planning and our nation's larger racial wealth gap.
Over the last century, urban planning and suburban sprawl have
"hard-wired" our dependence on automobiles.
Federal and state governments have consistently shifted resources
away from public transportation and toward highway construction.
Only 20 percent of gas tax revenue goes toward public transport
while 80 percent goes to building and maintaining highways. Public
transportation policies in many cities have failed to catch-up
with the changing demographics of where jobs are located,
increasing the advantages of car ownership.
But the “engine” divide is part of the
larger racial wealth divide. Between 2001 and 2004, the
median net worth of white families increased about 6 percent after
inflation to $136,000, while the black median wealth remained
unchanged at $20,000, according to the Federal Reserve. This
racial wealth gap is the legacy of several centuries of public
policies and private corporate practices that have encouraged
white wealth ownership and disadvantaged wealth-building by people
In our zeal to promote an “ownership
society” with broadened wealth and assets for low-income people,
policy-makers have neglected the transportation piece of the
puzzle. We need to recognize how access to dependable
transportation is a fundamental step on the road to
wealth-building. Owning a home in a new affordable suburban
community that has inadequate public transportation further
isolates families that don¹t own private cars.
For ecological and quality-of-life reasons, the
answer is not necessarily to expand private automobile ownership.
The cost of private car ownership is prohibitive for many
low-income families. A growing number of communities already
suffer from massive traffic congestion and many car users suffer
from longer and longer daily commutes. More cars won¹t solve
Instead, communities need to focus on
dependable public transportation systems and job creation closer
to transportation hubs. A number of cities are encouraging
business and job development closer to subway lines and rapid bus
routes. For example, the District of Columbia has encouraged
economic development on leased land near Metro stations that
includes mixed-use retail and light industrial plants. This
opens up jobs to car-less workers who have the option to walk,
bike, bus or train to jobs, reducing traffic congestion and
improving the overall quality of life.
People of color bear an unfair share of the
risks resulting from public policies that are biased toward car
ownership. Given the present bias in our emergency planning,
car ownership is a matter of life and death. But not owning
a car also stalls out many people of color on the road to
prosperity, closing the highway to jobs that require private
These problems are solvable, but we must first
see the invisible divides that exist around us. Hurricane
Katrina not only dramatically revealed the grotesque racial and
class divisions in our country, but also pointed to some obvious
causes, such as our car dependent economy. An inclusive and
dependable public transportation system should be at the top of
* * *
Meizhu Lui is the Executive Director of
United for a Fair Economy and the co-author of the new report,
"Stalling the Dream: Cars, Race and Hurricane
Evacuation," available at FairEconomy.org
posted 10 January 2006
* * * *
The State of African Education
Attack On Africans Writing Their Own
History Part 1 of 7
Dr Asa Hilliard III speaks on the assault of academia on
Africans writing and accounting for their own history.
Dr Hilliard is A
teacher, psychologist, and historian.
Part 2 of 7
3 of 7 /
Part 4 of 7
Part 5 of 7 /
Part 6 of 7 /
Part 7 of 7
John Henrik Clarke—A Great and Mighty Walk
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* * * * *
Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—
* * * * *
The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
* * * * *
The White Masters of the
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Browse all issues
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
George Jackson /
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
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26 March 2012