The Insight Center defines wealth as “the total value of assets minus debts.” Thus, the above figures reflect an individual’s median net worth “when debts exceed assets.”

Nicole Hilson, FSU student and Director of the Women’s Center was shocked at the gap, but approached it logically.

“I was surprised at the gap, but I understand why it’s there,” Hilson said. “Not that it’s okay in any way, shape or form, but I can see how institutions in this society could make that happen.”

According to the Insight Center, present U.S. institutions that make acquiring wealth difficult for the African American woman include: limited access to on-the-job benefits like health insurance, holiday pay, or pensions; the disabling affects of Public Assistance; the reality of habitually falling into lower paying job, and as a result, lower benefits of social insurance—social security, worker’s compensation, and unemployment insurance.

Although a lot of inequalities exist within the workforce itself, Dr. Mason, FSU Professor of Economics notes the significance of unemployment as well.

“African Americans sort of exist in a permanent deep recession,” Mason said. “[Their] unemployment rate usually hovers around 10% or 12%, what’s now the current national rate, and a lot of people are upset about it. Well, that’s the normal state of [black unemployment].”

The current unemployment rate for African American women, as estimated by the Labor Bureau of Statistics, is 11.7%, which is troubling considering that a great percentage of these women are single parents.

Because many single black women, like most unmarried women of other racial groups, hold the title of primary child-care provider, they must inevitably forgo many jobs due to lack of additional help in the home, prices of outside care, and unaccommodating nature of many job companies.

Audrey Torres of FSU’s Black Female Development Center has had personal experience with the poverty of black single mothers.

“My mom is a single mother, her mom was a single mother, and there are a lot of single women here who are in poverty raising children,” Torres said. “Poverty is a continued cycle.”

The Insight Center affirms her statement. According to their study, “black mothers with children under age 18 have a median wealth of zero.”

Raising a child alone is no doubt a strain on an individual’s finances, however, there are also other hindering economic effects that not having a spouse creates for these individuals.

BlackVoices online magazine states that “black women are the least likely group to get married, and if they do marry an African American man, those couples have the highest divorce rate in the country.” This reality produces an unsettling blow to these women’s financial status in comparison to men. As mentioned by the Center for Community Development, divorced women of color only have 26% of the wealth of divorced men of color, 8% of White women, and 5% of divorced White men.

Not only are discriminatory institutions fully intact in the U.S. today, but institutional factors of the past have played a major part in the current economic state for black women as well as black families, as stated in the report. For instance, the implementation of slavery, Jim Crow laws, “laws against interracial marriages, and policies which restricted opportunities for women to own and build assets.”

“Wealth is a way of transferring inequality across time,” Mason said. “If [there was] a large wealth gap 30-40 years ago, but [nothing was done] to adjust that wealth gap, even if you eliminate the wage gap, but [nothing’s done] about the accumulated differences from the past, then that wealth gap will persist for an extremely long period of time.”

Among the solutions included to help black women acquire and maintain wealth, the Insight Center recommends policies that will 1) improve employment opportunities, 2) support self employment, and 3) modify social insurance to provide adequate protection.

In addition to these proposals, Hilson believes that reeducation is also imperative.

“The actual solution would be to educate people about the systems that they’re apart of; the institutions they’ve grown to know and love, and how [society has] placed stereotypes and discriminations inside of their heads from day one,” Hilson said.

Although African American women can definitely use the above tools to better their accumulation of wealth, it will most likely be a very long time before they ever achieve economic equality, and finally close the economic gap.

“I think it’s always going to be a gap, maybe not as wide…[but] there’s always going to be discrimination, always going to be some type of prejudice between the races,” said Torres.

For more information visit www.racialwealthgap.org

Rap Sessions, a national tour led by CEO Bakari Kitwana that brings hip-hop activists, scholars, and artists to cities across the country in hopes of presenting dialogues of difficult issues facing today’s hip-hop generation, organized the event.

“This is the first time that we’ve done something of this magnitude,” said Sakeena Gohhgen, a Florida State University senior and Master Coordinator for the Black Student Union. “We’ve had small seminars, but to actually bring some professionals out, it hasn’t happened.”

Several cooperating campus organizations hosted the event, including the Black Student Union, the Hispanic/Latino Student Union, the Women’s Center, the Center for Multicultural Affairs and the Center for Liberal Studies.

A discussion among the panelists, based on questions posed by Kitwana, took up the first 40 minutes. Topics of conversation included Reggaeton and its lack of popular female artists, as well as professional criticisms of the recent film “Precious.”

After that, the floor was opened up to the audience and students were given the opportunity to ask the panelists their own questions. The final question of the night was “Does hip-hop as a culture hate women? Or, is it a lack of education on the history of hip hop that contributes to the apparent hate of women?”

Joycelyn Wilson, a member of the panel, and Scholar of Humanities, Leadership, and Hip-Hop Studies in the Morehouse College African American Studies program, gave the final response of the evening to that question.

“I don’t think that hip hop hates women,” said Wilson. “I think that hip-hop just provides a space to diagnose issues that exist outside of hip-hop.”

Wilson explained that in answering the question, one must first define what hip-hop is, already a complicated and problematic endeavor.

“Hip-hop for me might be something different for another generation that see themselves as hip-hop,” said Wilson. “When you look at hip-hop as a community of practices, rather than just a culture, then you’re able to look at different people, and what they do, how they practice, how they do hip-hop.”

Wilson also recognized the important role hip-hop plays in providing African American culture with means for dealing with gender issues.

“If you look at gender politics among a community, you’re going to always have, in any community, that space where you want to have men and women negotiating themselves, negotiating their space in a very complex way,” said Wilson. “Hip-hop does that, so while we have this situation of issues between black men and black women, we have issues between black men and black women in hip-hop because we have issues between black men and black women in the African American community.”

Students also found the topic more complex than it first seemed.

“When I heard the question, I was kind of like, it’s an unfair question,” said Briana Henderson, an FSU senior. “If you ask, ‘Does-hip hop hate women?’ then you have to ask, ‘Does society as a whole hate women?’ And ‘What is hate?’ There are so many sub-questions that come off of that.”

Overall, the event was received well by the attendants.

“It opened up my mind that [hip-hop] is a platform, because hip-hop is a way of expression, and through hip-hop, you can express how you’re feeling,” said Chazmen Geames, a graduate of Florida A&M University. “I think it really does open up a platform to address the social issues that we have.”

Others saw it as an opportunity to soak up the wisdom of the experienced.

“I loved it,” said Henderson. “I mean, our generation needs to learn how to sometimes just sit and listen and learn, instead of trying to talk all the time and trying to do stuff. We’re the microwave generation, we want everything done right now, right now, let’s do it—no. Take your time, listen to what people who have been there before you have done, dissect it, and then move forward.”

The other members of the panel included Raquel Z. Rivera, a writer, professor and current researcher at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, New York City; Tim’m West, a black, gay and feminist artist, author, and producer; and Joan Morgan, an award-winning journalist and author of When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip Hop Feminist.

The diverse opinions and backgrounds present mirrored the diverse audience in attendance.

“I was very, very, very impressed with the crowd,” said Gohhgen. “It was a diverse group of people—all ages, all races, genders. I was amazed at how many people stayed until the very end.”

To absorb the insight and experience presented by the panel and wrestle with them through the tough questions facing today’s hip-hop generation was an opportunity not taken for granted.

“Rarely do we have a panel discussion of people who have been in the trenches, who are literally dropping knowledge,” said Henderson, who herself is a past member of the BSU executive board. “It’s just nice to hear what people outside of this ivory tower called college have to say about what people are saying, up the street, on the other side of the country. It’s nice to hear that.”

A lot of people raised objections to a new Dodge Charger commercial when it premiered during the Superbowl, mostly along the lines of “it’s tacky, misogynistic, and lame.” So, inevitably, someone made a spoof of it to post on the internet. Here is that spoof, a “rebuttal” from the female perspective. And it’s, um, PERFECT. Seriously, if it was a real ad, I would buy whatever it was selling for my mom (she’s a third-wave feminist).

(via Alex Blaggazine)