For years, CHALLENGE has been reporting that the U.S. ruling class needs racism and its resulting discrimination because it nets hundreds of billions in profits from the lower wages paid to black workers (including Latino workers in the last century), dragging down the wage levels of ALL workers. Institutional racist inequality has spanned 30 generations — from slavery to post-Civil War legal segregation, enforced by KKK terror — to current racism. Now reports reveal this generational racism means that for every dollar of assets accumulated by white families (home and auto ownership, government subsidies, savings, pensions, among other factors), black families have only 10 cents worth of assets!

This doesn’t mean that white working-class families are so well off. The average in the above comparison includes upper-income white families, far more numerous than upper-income black families. Actually, the Federal Reserve’s “Survey of Consumer Finances” reports that overall the net worth of the average U.S. family today is less than it was in 2001. (Washington Post, 3/23/09) However, racist discrimination enables the bosses to net super-profits from the differential in income and assets denied to black families as compared to white families.

The biggest single factor in accumulating assets is home ownership. Historically, black families have been far less able to “reap the benefits of government support and tax-paid subsidies, which help...build assets. During the Depression [of the 1930s]…the Home Owners Loan Corporation was established “to rescue families from home foreclosures, but not a single…loan went to a black or Hispanic family….

“The black section of Detroit was simply excluded. After World War II, GIs received government-subsidized home mortgages….Of the 67,000 mortgages issued under the GI Bill in New York and northern New Jersey,” only 100 went to black veterans! (Washington Post)

This discrimination is just as marked today as revealed in the home foreclosure swindle. “Payday lenders and other shady financial dealers…have preyed on [black and Latino] people fueling the economic and foreclosure crisis. African Americans…were more than three times as likely as white borrowers to be steered to high-interest loans, even when they qualified for a prime loan.”

Moreover, U.S. tax-code rules, “Have strengthened…those who already have assets. You can get a tax deduction for interest on home mortgages of up to $1 million….But if you own a home and make too little to itemize [on one’s tax return], the mortgage interest doesn’t help you at all.”

Concludes the Washington Post writer Meizhu Lui, “The over-hyped political term ‘post-racial society’ becomes patently absurd when looking at these economic numbers.” The super-profits accumulated from this racism helps the ruling class pay for imperialist oil wars abroad, and they use racism to justify attacks on Arab and South Asian workers at home and worldwide.

The depressed assets of black and Latino families make it more difficult for them to obtain health insurance and therefore access to adequate healthcare, as well as to avoid bankruptcy from uninsured medical bills. This lack of assets lessens their ability to gain legal assistance when needed and to pay the rising tuition of their children’s education.

This generational racism keeps their children in a downward spiral. “The biggest predictor of the future economic status of a child is the net worth of the child’s parents.” But as indicated above, historically black families have received less “government support and tax-paid subsidies for their asset-building activities.” The GI Bill sending veterans to college after World War II was overwhelmingly denied to black vets, stemming from their discriminatory position in the then segregated armed forces.

This gap in assets or net worth is widening. The 10 cents referred to earlier was 12 cents in 2004. “These African American losses appear near-permanent, the result of the deindustrialization of the United States — the destruction of the black blue-collar workforce.” (Black-White Wealth Gap Continues to Widen in U.S., by Joshua Holland, posted on AlterNet) This is especially true of the mass layoffs in basic industries like auto and steel.

As CHALLENGE has reported, the bosses are shifting their profit-making production from higher-paid, formerly unionized plants to non-union subcontractors spread across the South, Southwest and California, paying black, Latino and immigrant workers less than half the wages of the older plants, with no benefits. Given this drive for super-profits, especially based on racism, the wages and conditions of the entire working class are suffering. Racism hurts ALL workers, even as it hurts black and Latino workers the most — just as the bosses’ economic crisis hurts all workers, while oppressing black and Latino workers even more.

Since black households “earn less than 60 percent of median white income,” says the above AlterNet posting, “At the pace of catch-up since 1968, according to a report issued…by United for A Fair Economy, ‘it would take 581 years’ [for black families] to achieve income parity.” But that will never arrive; it will only help to reduce white family income.

It is only through the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist profit-driven society and its state apparatus, and the establishment of communism — without bosses, profits, a wage system and racism — that the entire working class, which produces all value, will receive the full fruits of our labors according to need.

That’s “communist parity.”