Initial Broadcast Date: November 9, 1971
30 minutes – Color
Three leading black economists assess the economic reality for blacks living under the Nixon administration on this report entitled “Blackonomics.”
Host Tony Brown guides this Black Journal discussion with Robert Brown, director of the New York-based Black Economic Research Center and founder-publisher of the Review of Black Political Economy; Dr. Dunbar McLaren, a former economist for the federal Office of Price Administrations and consultant-founder of Freedom National Bank; and Dr. Karl Gregory, professor of Economic and management at Oakland University (Detroit), a consultant to the Center for Afro-American and African studies at the University of Michigan, and an organizer of the first black bank in Detroit.
The three panelists agree that President Nixon’s economic policies fail to meet the most crucial needs of the black community – power, wealth and employment. They point out that the lot of the black man is not substantially changed by the new proposals, which do not include, according to Dr. Gregory, “large-scale urban business development and capital accumulation programs, as well as other techniques for attacking structural unemployment, massive job creation at a living wage, and the elimination of barriers to equal opportunity.”
Dr. Gregory feels that Nixon’s policy will increase the level of employment somewhat, however, “although blacks will snare in the added jobs, their unemployment rate will still be twice that for whites.”
Brown points out that it is increasingly difficult for blacks to find jobs because of urban migration patterns, the movement of jobs out to the suburbs and the closure of suburbs to Black residential places.
Once employed, however, the black man has the “double hammer hitting” him since “the prices on the things that he spends are rising consistently and he can’t increase his wages.”
The black man is always lagging behind in the wage-price sphere, just as he is constantly lagging behind in other areas – “We have the cities that are turned over to the black mayor only when it comes into a condition of absolute paralysis,” says Dr. McLaren. “What’s going to change this lag is that we become a part of the decision-making and power-wielding forces of this economy.”
But the three economists claim that the Nixon programs fail to include consultation with black representatives.
“Black Journal,” a production of NET Division, Educational Broadcasting Corporation
Executive producer: Tony Brown
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