By Lee A. Daniels

At first glance, the report the Pew Research Center released last week on the impact of the thirty-month-long economic crisis on Americans’ finances and psyches contains a startling mystery.

Black Americans, who as a group have suffered a significantly worse financial setback than white Americans, are significantly more optimistic than whites about the country’s economic future and their own, according to the document, “A Balance Sheet at 30 Months: How The Great Recession Has Changed Life in America. (PDF)”

The same pattern also holds for Latino Americans. They, too, have endured greater financial hardship than whites, but express greater optimism in every category of Pew’s pessimism-to-optimism scale.

For example, 57 percent of whites say the recession, which the survey authors call the “Great Recession,” is continuing. But only 45 percent and 43 percent of blacks and Latinos, respectively, hold that view; and a far greater percent of blacks and Latinos – 81 and 74 percent, respectively – still consider America a land of prosperity, compared to 59 percent of whites.

What makes the racial disparities the more dramatic is that, when compared with whites, blacks and Latinos have endured a markedly greater loss of jobs and wages, and a precipitous loss of household wealth.

The survey found a similar pessimism-optimism disparity among Democrats compared to Republicans, and among young adults compared to middle-aged and older adults. The differences hold true, the report stated, “regardless of their income, education, gender or whether they have had difficulty paying their bills, making mortgage or rent payments; getting or paying for medical care; or having had to cut spending during the recession.”

The study’s authors suggest that “in an age of highly polarized politics,” these various groups “differ not only in their values, attitudes and policy positions, but, increasingly, in their basic perceptions of reality.” They refer to the fact that a previous Pew study published in January found essentially the same disparities in outlook among these various groups, with African Americans being especially optimistic.

The Pew reports’ view of the impact of the President’s election on black Americans’ psyches is partly right. But it confuses causes with consequences.

The gateway to understanding the optimism blacks feel even in the face of an alarming deterioration of their economic position can be put in one word.

Faith.

There’s no mystical mumbo-jumbo in that assessment. One could put it in seemingly polar-opposite terms: black Americans are battle-hardened.

That becomes apparent if one considers three factors that undergird this optimism.

First, black Americans have a profound experience with economic adversity, not just historically, but in the present as well. They have always been shadowed by persisting high rates of unemployment, under-employment and poverty. After recording marked gains in employment and income during the so-called Long Boom of the 1990s, blacks were devastated by the recession of 2001, and, financially-speaking, have never recovered. While the white unemployment rate never exceeded 5.2 percent from 2000 to 2008, the official black unemployment rate ranged from 10 to 11 percent on an annualized basis for more than half that period. Indeed, federal labor department statistics show that on an annualized basis the black unemployment rate rose above 10 percent in 30 of the last 37 years. Throughout that period, the white unemployment rose above 8 percent in just two months.

In other words, black Americans have been enduring a sustained crisis of mass unemployment crisis since the early 1970s.

Second, the black political rights movement that the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 made possible produced enormous political success at the local, state and federal levels that is now often glibly denigrated. Equally important, it schooled the black voting masses in how to play the electoral game – lessons they used to great effect in electing one high-profile black office-seeker (Obama) and, just recently, in defeating another (Rep. Artur Davis, D-Ala.).

Finally, black Americans continue to be buoyed by what has most sustained them since enslaved Africans began petitioning the colonial courts for their freedom in the early 1600s. That is their allegiance to the nation’s secular religion: political democracy. The black freedom struggle of the twentieth century was a movement not only driven by a faith based in Judeo-Christian religious principles. It was also rooted in the belief that their working to reform – democratize – the political system would bring them the rights that were theirs by birth. Long before Martin Luther King, Jr. said so, black Americans were intent on persuading White America to provide sufficient funds to make good on the “promissory note” of the American Dream.

Set against the extraordinary tapestry of black Americans’ existence in America, then, the remarkable optimism the Pew surveys of this year have found they possess is perfectly logical.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.; and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.