In 2013, a black male head of householder living in Baton Rouge earned 50 cents for every dollar his white male counterpart earned, according to a report commissioned in advance of an Urban Congress on African American Males in Baton Rouge this weekend.
Income isn’t the only category in which disparity between blacks and whites is statistically evident. According to the report, which is based on U.S. Census data, deficits can be found in education, health care, access to business opportunities and employment—especially for black males.
The report also notes that even though black citizens make up 46% of the total population in East Baton Rouge, they comprise one-third of business owners in the parish.
The report was commissioned and produced by the urban renewal nonprofit MetroMorphosis, ahead of Saturday’s Urban Congress on African-American Males in Baton Rouge at Baton Rouge Community College. Registration for the congress is closed; organizers say 250 delegates will be attending.
The Rev. Raymond Jetson of Star Hill Church and president of MetroMorphosis’ board of directors, says the event is not about “fixing black boys and men,” but rather it’s an initiative to seizing on assets and other gems within the city’s black community to design strategies for achieving identifiable goals over the course of the next year.
“We choose to begin with the assets, not the deficits,” Jetson says. He adds that the congress is vital because Baton Rouge cannot become a truly thriving vibrant community as long as a particular segment of the population remains impacted in a such a profound way.
“There are contributing factors to the circumstances that we see from both perspectives,” Jetson says. “We certainly cannot ignore personal responsibility and personal choices, but neither can we ignore the system and structures and how they impact these experiences.”
The report notes that blacks were locked into the sharecropping system after U.S. slavery ended and were excluded from the mass accumulation of wealth after War World II, thereby setting blacks and whites on different economic pathways.
“While the gaps between members of the dominant racial group and people of color in the United States are great, gaps are oftentimes even more pronounced on some quality of life indicators when one considers race and gender together,” the report reads, adding that the experiences of black boys and men relative to white male counterparts are often minimized and trivialized.
The action-driven congress is intended to provide a constructive framework for conversations about the realities black boys and men in Baton Rouge experience. It is not a town hall-style meeting.
“Seeing news reports, newspaper articles, magazine stories that in so many different ways described the experiences of black boys in and men in our community in negative deficit laden perspectives, and I along with others just sense that there needed to be a community response to the issues,” Jetson says.
—Alexandria Burris
