Posh Notes
The 1970s Oil Crisis Hurt Black Americans...and This One Will Too
Between recently teaching about the 1970s global recession and grimacing at the cost of filling up my gas tank, I couldn’t help but reflect on the fact that there are many ways this moment feels reminiscent of the past. As we all feel the effects of the current war in Iran, I suspect that even the least studious students of history are reminded of the 1970s oil crisis. Granted, those price surges were initially sparked by OPEC. But during and after the Iranian Revolution, the price of oil went up because of the disruption in the oil supply.
For Americans, 1970s stagflation represented something of an unwanted reckoning. From the post-WWII era forward, Americans not only witnessed economic growth; they were part of it. Sure, there were temporary downturns, but those were just blips on the scale. Stagflation changed all that, and it undermined people’s faith in the nation’s economic system.
But that post-war boom was never evenly distributed. After all, it was sparked by things like the GI Bill, which Black veterans never had full access to. One of the most important wealth-building mechanisms the GI bill provided was federally backed home mortgages. And even those who somehow managed to financially position themselves to buy a home were locked out of new suburban neighborhoods by neighborhood covenants and HOAs that explicitly forbade the sale of homes to Black families. And think about how access, and the lack thereof, to certain neighborhoods would impact which schools children went to, and how much funding those schools received.
Stagflation, which absolutely impacted middle-class Americans, hit poor and working-class Americans even harder. And when jobs were cut, and businesses were forced to do mass layoffs, they tended to employ an idea called “last hired, first fired.” And guess which group of people was most likely to have only recently gained access to those jobs?
Stagflation and the oil crisis hurt just about everyone aside from the uber-wealthy. But it hurt poor, working-class, and newly middle-class people the hardest. That is no small matter. These types of disruptions undermine people’s ability to create generational wealth…to pay their children’s way to college…to help an adult child buy their first home.
When economic downturns swing back around, the recovery isn’t immediate. It isn’t even accomplished within a generation. These are generational traumas.
Have you been noticing the impact of rising prices in your day-to-day life yet?
This is the kind of thinking I’ll be sharing in Posh Notes…quick reflections on a current event or recent video. Future Posh Notes will be for paid subscribers.