Abstract
The 2008 Great Recession demonstrated that our country’s economy was not what it was supposed to be. Indeed, it seemed our country’s prosperity had been built on a proverbial house of cards. In the Great Recession’s wake, millions of American citizens experienced declines in their wealth and income, and many citizens dealt with diminishing health and even homelessness. Indeed, the Great Recession prompted a global economic downturn that devastated financial markets. It increased home mortgage foreclosures. And it cast untold numbers of people into socioeconomic precarity whereby they lost jobs, savings, equity, houses, and livelihoods. Given the Great Recession’s widespread consequences, documenting the Great Recession’s human toll remains a noble undertaking.
In Black Families and Recession in the United States: The Enduring Impact of the Great Recession of 2007–2009, authors Dorothy Smith-Ruiz and Albert M. Kopak provide a treatise for understanding the economic devastations prompted by the Great Recession. Specifically, Smith-Ruiz and Kopak delineate how the Great Recession affected African American families. They explore how structural inequalities affect black families and their future life chances. This project’s ambitions are commendable. On that dimension alone, the authors ought to be applauded.
Who are the authors? Dorothy Smith-Ruiz is an associate professor of Africana Studies at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. Smith-Ruiz received her PhD in Sociology from Michigan State University, pursued postdoctoral studies in public health and epidemiology at Yale University, and has published scholarship across a range of topics, among others grandmothers in multi-generational families, mass incarceration, and social determinants of health. Smith-Ruiz is an award-winning teacher and Fulbright Scholar. Smith-Ruiz’s coauthor, Albert Kopak, is a professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Western Carolina University. Kopak received his PhD in Justice Studies from Arizona State University. Kopak actively conducts research about substance use disorders, mental health, and justice-related outcomes in corrections. Together, Smith-Ruiz and Kopak bring to bear their respective life experiences and expertise in this work about the Great Recession and how its collateral consequences continue to shape African American family life in the United States.
Black Families and Recession in the United States pivots around a couple focal questions. First, how did the Great Recession affect black family life? Second, to what extent did the Great Recession create financial crises for African Americans? To address these two questions, the authors deploy descriptive, historical, and structural frameworks to explore copious issues facing African American families. While primarily relying on secondary data and previously published literature to substantiate its claims, Black Families and Recession in the United States includes ten chapters that span a gamut of topics: an articulation of theoretical concepts about contemporary black family life; an identification of the Great Recession’s causes and consequences and their impact on black families; an elaboration on the prevalence of home ownership in black communities; an analysis of how wealth inequality between black and white households has widened since 2008; and an exegesis about the destabilizing effects of incarceration on black communities. A major theme laced throughout Black Families and Recession in the United States is that black families (on average) have fared worse in upholding their standard of living when compared to white families. Moreover, the authors strongly contend that the Great Recession exacerbated deeply entrenched socioeconomic disparities (by race) in American society.
The primary strength of Black Families and Recession in the United States is its focused treatment of an important public issue: the recession’s consequences as experienced by African Americans. Smith-Ruiz and Kopak’s statistical descriptions and analytical perspectives about the Great Recession’s consequences for African Americans succeed in highlighting multivariate manifestations of a global hyper-capitalist society that has run amok. Another virtue of the book is that its overall structure is friendly to the reader, making it appropriate reading for students (and professors) seeking easy-to-digest snapshots about classic sociological topics like intersectionality, colorblind and systemic racism, and the link between housing wealth and economics for African American families. Importantly, the book is peppered with optimism, hopefulness, and a strong belief that academic scholarship can change the world for the better. These are some points of excellence contained within the pages of Black Families and Recession in the United States.
The book supplies its reader with relevant theoretical frameworks, statistical descriptions, and optimism about the possibility of creating a just and democratic society. However, no book is without weaknesses. And so, let us address one of them. As already mentioned, the book relies on secondary statistical data. Statistical portraits tend to monolithically flatten entire segments of the populace, reducing them to government labels created by the U.S. Census Bureau (e.g., black, white, Latino/Hispanic, Asian American, Native American, etc.). Indeed, Smith-Ruiz and Kopak are fond of drawing generic comparisons between black and white populations. Doing so gives us a limited sense of racial differences “on average,” and what gets glossed over in these generalized statistical pictures is substantial inter-group variation and inequality that occur within ethnoracial categories.
For example, when comparing African Americans who are modern-day ancestors of slaves with black Americans who voluntarily immigrated from African and Caribbean countries, do we observe socioeconomic differences? Additionally, how does the social scientific narrative change when we include Asian Americans and Native Americans in our comparative statistical models? Further, how do we structurally explain white poverty without reducing the white poor to simplistic and cartoonish caricatures? As they say, the devil is in the details. And a nuanced social science ought to concern itself with providing comprehensive assessments that explain sociological variability, both across and within group formations. Of course, the scholarly conventions and norms that frequently regulate quantitative social scientific writing can inhibit authors from engaging in the type of complex analyses that studiously examine sources of intra- and inter-group variability. So the foregoing critique must be taken with a grain of salt.
In sum, Black Families and Recession in the United States contributes to the ever-expanding scholarship about the Great Recession’s collateral consequences. The authors prove themselves to be serious and sincere academics who clearly endeavor to produce relevant writings that shape our understanding of pressing public issues. Despite some notable weaknesses, the book prevails in the end, succinctly presenting readers with useful information. Steadfastly, I join the authors in the hope that Black Families and Recession in the United States will be a springboard for social justice and will promote change in American society.