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December 4, 2008 10:30:07 AM CST

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Black Families Need Their 40 Acres

Posted Nov 18, 07 3:22 PM CST in Arts & Living,  US 

(Newser) – With a poll last week showing that African Americans no longer think of themselves as a "single race," Henry Louis Gates Jr explores causes of  the widening gap between middle class and poor blacks. His study of 20 highly successful African Americans, from Oprah to Whoopi to a pediatric neurosurgeon, shows most were descended from former slaves who managed to obtain property by 1920. Ownership, he argues, is the answer.

Gates makes a distinction between income and wealth: Those who “own property,” he says, “feel a sense of ownership in their future and their society.” A bold approach to the problem of black poverty would be programs to turn tenants into homeowners, a steep challenge in the wake of the subprime crisis, but critical to ensure the next generation of black Americans—69% born out of wedlock—has an “ethic of success” and not of despair.

Source New York Times

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Whoopi Goldberg talks with reporters at Universal City, Calif., in this July 18, 2006, file photo. Goldberg, officially named the new moderator of "The View" on Wednesday, Aug. 1, 2007, as the daytime...   (Associated Press)
Oprah poses for a picture at the CFDA Fashion Awards in New York in this June 4, 2007 file photo. Winfrey concluded her show's taping in Macon on Saturday, but not without dispensing gifts. Under...   (Associated Press)
Martin Robinson Delany   (Archive Photos)
The office of US civil rights pioneer Frederick Douglass.   (Getty Images)
Henry Louis Gates Jr.   (Getty Images)
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Oprah Winfrey • African Americans • poverty • homeowners • slavery • homeownership • Whoopi Goldberg • values • Frederick Douglass


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