Fact Checking the FACT-SHEET
Dissecting the White House's "Wins" for Black Americans
“If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then YOU AIN’T BLACK!”
These were the words from President Joe Biden vying for the black vote during the 2020 presidential election cycle to the host of The Breakfast Club, Charlamagne the god. By this point in the campaign, Biden’s promises to black people would include vague platitudes about the importance of diversity and both criminal and economic justice.
However, as his campaign ran off the fumes of being the Vice-President to the first black President, Barack Obama, in his 40+ years of government work, Biden’s political record had a pattern of opposition to black American progress instead of that of an ally. These acts include but are not limited to, his affection for segregationist, his support for the war on drugs, and his authoring of the 1994 Crime Bill. Despite his insulting assertion made to Charlamagne and Biden’s historical role as an adversary to black Americans, Biden would receive 87% of the black vote in the 2020 election.
As the 2024 Presidential Election approaches, the Biden administration would see an increasing decline in support amongst one of the Democratic Party’s most loyal voting blocks, black voters, now sitting at 71%. This decline has put a lot of pressure on black bourgeois servants to the duopoly to essentially gaslight the black masses about the current administration's victories for the black community and Biden’s electability against Donald Trump. For example, Jim Clyburn’s bad faith praise for Biden’s victory in the SC Democratic primary, touting his receival of over 90% of the primary votes while ignoring the abysmal turnout of 4% of eligible primary voters.
This act of covering for the failures of Democratic administrations is a common action among the black petite-bourgeoisie and capitalist class, who stand to benefit financially from the status quo the Democratic Party upholds. The purpose of this article is to properly contextualize and fact-check prominent claims of victories for our community that we will most certainly hear ad-nauseum from this class of black liberals.
Claim 1: Powered a historic economic recovery that created 2.6 million jobs for Black workers—and achieved both the lowest Black unemployment rate on record and the lowest gap between Black and White unemployment on record.
Let’s start with job creation.
Based on the occupational outlook for jobs created from 2022 to a projected year of 2032 found in the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there has been an approximate total of 3.5 million jobs created. The occupations with the two largest numbers were home health/patient care aides (804,000) and software developers (410,000) accounting for over 30% of the jobs created.
However, the fact one may be employed does not translate to that employment being enough to sustain a life without severe financial insecurity. Per the New York Post, “on average, single workers in the US require an annual income of $57,200 to make a living wage in America.” Of the 3.5 million jobs created, 54% of those jobs, with the highest growing job having the lowest income of jobs created ($30,180 per year), fell under that threshold of a liveable wage.
Though the reality of the lack of financial security found in the majority of the jobs to which Americans are employed negates the latter “victory” of lowering the black unemployment rate. There is a comment regarding the “historical” lowered gap between white and black unemployment rates that falsely celebrates that fact as a sign of economic progress for black Americans.
Today, the unemployment ratio between black and white Americans nationally is 2:1. However, this ratio has been the case consistently for decades. The only reason the gap itself is lower is due to the overall unemployment rate being lowered. To add insult to injury, according to a 2023 Quarter 3 Report regarding the State of Unemployment by Race from the Economic Policy Institute, the unemployment ratios between black and white Americans in states with unemployment rates greater than the national average were found to be much greater as well. The highest ratio of 5:1 found in Washington D.C. and the top 8 states with the highest unemployment rate and ratio being majority Democrat-ran.
Claim 2: Helped Black working families build wealth. Black wealth is up by 60% relative to pre-pandemic—the largest increase on record.
This sounds incredible at face value, but with further context, this too is a false victory. Reporting from Axios found merit in the claim of 60% growth in wealth and compared to other groups, this growth was the largest. However, they provided further context stating the following:
“The median net worth of Black households is the lowest among the groups included in the survey. The median for white households was $285,000, while Hispanic households had a median net worth of $61,600, compared to the $45,000 median for Black households.”
Even with said growth, we are still at the bottom of the economic ladder by over $15,000 from the next lowest group. We also have to ask, where the growth came from and who it actually impacted?
The majority of wealth growth for black Americans was derived via increases in home equity followed by business equity, very little growth came from ownership of stocks per The Brookings Institute. The institute also reinforced the idea of growing racial wealth gap reaching a historic size with increase in black wealth.
It is imperative to understand the significance, or rather, insignificance of growth stemming mainly from home equity. This is a financial gain for the ownership class of black Americans. 44% of black Americans actually own the homes they reside in, and an even smaller percentage own multiple properties. This increase in wealth still leaves behind a majority of black Americans and it shows with an overall median income being the only income the trails behind the $57,200 income of liveable wage.
The same could be said for the growth of black business equity. Though representing over 14% of the U.S. population, less than 3% (140,918) of employment firms were owned by black Americans in 2020, seeing a growth of 4% (around 6,000) in 2023. Leaving behind a vast majority of black Americans who are not entrepreneurs.
Claim 3: Cut in half the number of Black children living in poverty in 2021 through ARP’s Child Tax Credit expansion. This expansion provided breathing room to the families of over 9 million Black children.
This is an insulting farce of a claim of progress.
The claim itself is actually true, child poverty was drastically decreased due to the Child Tax Credit. It is also true that this decrease happened in 2021. However, in that same year, a Democrat-controlled Congress, under a Democrat-controlled White House, allowed the credit to expire with little to no pushback from the White House.
The following year of 2022 saw child poverty spike to double the rate of 2021 and remained as such.
Claim 4: Delivered a historic investment of over $7 billion to support HBCUs.
One of President Biden’s campaign promises was to cancel debt for graduates of Historically Black Colleges & Universities, using Howard graduate Vice-President Kamala Harris as reassurance of the president’s dedication to HBCUs. This $7 billion has nothing to do with student debt.
The $7 billion to HBCUs is used to pay off the schools’ capital debt, fund activities, and expand grants, all good things. What makes this claim yet another false victory is as follows.
Compared to Donald Trump’s funding, the claim of the $7 billion investment being historic is true. However, the White House, itself, concludes this $7 billion falls short of the more than $13 billion estimation to what state-run, land-grant HBCUs are actually owed. What the White House is doing with this claim is manipulative. Literally selling the idea of receiving half of what we are owed as a net positive as this same administration pushes for hundreds of billions of dollars to go towards war.
This is also another “victory” that abandons the majority of black Americans, with less than 40% of college-aged black Americans attending college or university and about 10% of those students actually attending an HBCU.
Claim 5: Signed a historic Executive Order to put federal policing on the path to becoming the gold standard of effectiveness and accountability by requiring federal law enforcement agencies to ban chokeholds; restrict no-knock warrants; mandate the use of body-worn cameras; implement stronger use-of-force policies; provide de-escalation training; submit use-of-force data; submit officer misconduct records into a new national accountability database; and restrict the sale or transfer of military equipment to local law enforcement agencies, among other things.
After witnessing one of the largest global calls for reforming American policing that were the George Floyd protests of 2020, the Biden administration again falls entirely short of the demands made during those protests. He would fail to use the bully pulpit to actually pass a police reform bill while also advising state governments to use Covid-19 money to fund the police.
During his 2022 State of the Union, Biden gave an unforgettable call to action to fund the police. He kept this promise by funding the Department of Justice $4.9 billion in discretionary funds for state and local public safety. The call to action was received and followed by numerous states, including many liberal local governments, who passed legislation to develop police training facilities as well as criminalize the unhoused. As police receive more funding, the number of deaths by officers would also steadily increase, with 2023 being one of the deadliest years for police brutality.
Reporting from the Hill found there were only 14 days in 2023 in which someone was not killed by a police officer. They later stated, “Last year also represented the sharpest increase in deaths from the year prior, with a 6.3 percent increase from 2022. There were 1,250 police killings in 2022, 1,178 in 2021 and 1,251 in 2020.” Black Americans are still over-represented in police killings by almost 3-to-1 compared to white Americans.
Biden’s commitment to addressing police brutality is entirely undermined by not only this continued desire to fund the police, but also his support for Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. For it is the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) that train our state police, the tactics of occupation and brutality are shared between these entities.
Utilizing Our Political Power
The black professional managerial class (PMC) will do what it consistently has done with our political power and waste it. The black PMC will both use these fake victories for our community as well as fear monger against the Republican party as an existential threat to our community to galvanize black political power around a demented white supremacist and a party that has consistently taken our loyalty for granted.
This class of black people either cynically pushes or naively believes that the pathway to black liberation in a racist, capitalist country is to teach more people about the branches of government, how bills are made and passed, how evil the Republicans are, and that they should participate in the duopoly. We can not continue to operate like this.
This again is not a call to completely abandon electoral politics. Our local elections will always directly impact the community of that electorate. School boards, judges, and sheriffs should always be researched and, as political activists, we should push for educating the electorate of these local positions, who holds these positions, and what they’ve done while in those positions.
There are state ballot initiatives that we as the electorate can directly vote for to change our state laws. Florida, for example, will have legalizing recreational marijuana on the ballot in 2024, this is an opportunity to bypass the ineffective state and federal legislators that have failed to deliver this nationally supported statute.
However, our true power and leverage comes from our ability to abandon our elected leaders, who have abandoned us, during these election seasons.
Instead of putting our money and support behind a man that is enabling a genocide, we follow the position of the Arab/Muslim Americans by leveraging our support to receive a positive gain for our community before we commit to voting for a candidate. As we increase this threat to the candidate that relies on our support to succeed, we invest in mutual aid societies that directly protect the most vulnerable of our population from the fascism we are told to fear from the party in opposition to the one we’ve been loyal to.
With black Greek fraternities and sororities alone, there are enough assets and capital that can establish free clinics, create free gardens and farms for the people, train the people in self-defense, invest in worker co-ops, as opposed to creating more black capitalist and practicing apologetics for imperialism as they do now.
The black bourgeoisie will never be the leaders for revolution and liberation that they claim to want to achieve because they are beneficiaries of the status quo. It is an empowered black proletariat that will bring about the necessary change required for our people, and it is the role of the well-hearted black PMC to support the empowerment of the proletariat, be it financially or simply with time the proletariat may not have to dispose. That is the political education and utilization of power that will truly benefit us as an abandoned community.