The Liquidity Crisis of 2008: What Black People Should Do Now
Written by Dr. Boyce Watkins
Most of you have
been watching politicians shuck and jive in predictable ways to try and
manage the even more predictable liquidity crisis that has terrorized
our financial markets. As a supporter of Senator Barack Obama, I am
hopeful that this will serve as the final signal to America that a
Harvard graduate with extensive Economics training might be a better
choice than a mediocre student who claims to know nothing about the
economy. I won’t even mention Sarah Palin, who now makes George Bush
the runner-up in the “Unfit to Manage a Burger King” contest. I am not
big on Obama-mania, but I tend to be big on common sense. It is also
telling that many Americans would sacrifice our nation’s future in
order to avoid the discomfort of seeing a Black man in the White
House. OK, let me shut up before I say what I REALLY think.
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Joomla Popin Window by DART CreationsMy younger brother let me listen a few tracks of an album by
popular hip-hop artist, Kanye West one day when I was in his car.On the few tracks I listened to, Kanye was
basically poking fun of the fact that a growing number of college graduates
emerge with nothing more than a retail job at the mall and have not become more
marketable.But they could still be
proud because, after all, they still have their degree.
Does West have a point?Is it really worth the effort of going through four years of
college?Will college graduates be able
to reasonably justify the costs of higher education, and if so when? And if it
isn’t worth it, at what point in tuition level does it become worth it?Statistics show that tuition rates have risen
by 439% since 1982, far surpassing the inflation rate. Even with all the recent
uproar about fuel prices, it still is not even half of the increase in
tuition.In addition to this, federal
grants have consistently been decreasing while students and parents of students
continue to take on huge amounts of debt to either land that raise or
higher-paying job.
The first woman to charter a bank in the United States was an African-American woman!
An African-American woman whose mother was a former slave and whose father is said to have been an Irish immigrant.
Maggie Lena Walker, who began working as a child, helping her mother wash clothes in an alleyway in Richmond, Virginia; was the first woman, black or white, to launch a financial institution for African-Americans. She overcame not only the oppression of the racist Jim Crow Era, but even defeated the prevalent sexism of the day that purposefully excluded women as viable economic forces.
This African-American visionary was often quoted as saying, , "Let us put our money together; let us use our money; Let us put our money out at usury among ourselves, and reap the benefit ourselves."
She practiced what she preached by only employing African-Americans within a variety of roles from butler to architect throughout her life. Walker note only owned a bank, but she established a newspaper, The St. Luke Herald, in 1902, and served as one of the national leaders for the St. Luke’s fraternal burial society, which supported the sick and elderly within the African-American community before social security or welfare programs were established.
Most of you have
been watching politicians shuck and jive in predictable ways to try and
manage the even more predictable liquidity crisis that has terrorized
our financial markets. As a supporter of Senator Barack Obama, I am
hopeful that this will serve as the final signal to America that a
Harvard graduate with extensive Economics training might be a better
choice than a mediocre student who claims to know nothing about the
economy. I won’t even mention Sarah Palin, who now makes George Bush
the runner-up in the “Unfit to Manage a Burger King” contest. I am not
big on Obama-mania, but I tend to be big on common sense. It is also
telling that many Americans would sacrifice our nation’s future in
order to avoid the discomfort of seeing a Black man in the White
House. OK, let me shut up before I say what I REALLY think. 
The first woman to charter a bank in the United States was an African-American woman!