Barring Mainstream to Blacks Said to Cost Economy Billions : Bigotry: While fretting about foreign competition, the United States ignores a potent resource waiting to be discovered.

Racism is costing America money.

Bigotry subtracts from economic growth in the often-recited toll of welfare and unemployment, in the high cost of crime that demands more police and prisons, in the tariff exacted by what often seems to be self-destructive ghetto violence.

Worse, racism deprives the nation of energy, know-how, drive and dollars.

“There are a lot of things that suggest that racism is the most insidious phenomenon causing a drag on the American economy,” said Edward D. Irons, dean of business at Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta and a consultant to federal and international agencies on banking and economic development.

“Unless we get a handle on racism, foreign competitors are going to eat our lunch,” Irons said.

Imagine the Los Angeles riots laying waste to America day after day. Or wipe out the communications industry. That’s roughly how much the U.S. economy misses out by not providing more opportunities for the nation’s 30 million blacks, according to Billy J. Tidwell, a social scientist at the National Urban League in Washington.

It’s a steep price, by Tidwell’s reckoning: $93 billion--close to 2% of the Gross National Product--could be pumped into the U.S. economy every year if the per capita income of blacks was on a par with whites.

Calculated per household, that comes to $1,000 each year. Consider it a hidden fee.

Tidwell did the arithmetic for a 1990 report on racism’s bottom line, but his figures hold steady, he said.

“Not enough people . . . put it into concrete terms,” he said, “reduced to the lowest common denominator of self-interest.”

That’s only part of the drain. Consider the growing ranks of the poor.

Blacks total about 12.1% of America’s population, but about one-third of recipients of welfare, health care and unemployment benefits. The price tag: $30 billion.

Black unemployment is invariably 2 to 2 1/2 times the overall jobless rate.

Then add to that the alarming fact that 25% of black men and teen-agers end up behind bars--many of them briefly. The 1990 price tag: about $7 billion.

Harder to add up are the intangibles, sometimes referred to as the race tax. These include shorter life expectancy, confinement by housing discrimination and poverty to dangerous, stressful ghettos with often terrible living conditions and heartbreak.

Robert Solow, an economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who won a Nobel Prize for his theory of economic growth, said that preventing people from using their minds and talent cripples the economy.

“There’s a lot of evidence that what economists calls ‘human capital’ plays a very big role in international competitiveness and economic growth,” Solow said, “and if you take 10% or 15% of the population and fail to capitalize fully the human capital that is there, it has to be a drag on growth and in long-term competitiveness.”

Agreeing with this notion, if not the numbers, is Stuart Butler, an economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank that’s had the ear of the Reagan and Bush administrations.

“Racism always leads to a reduction in the GNP in any country,” said Butler, whose specialty is domestic policy. “The issue is to what degree, and what you do about it.”

Butler noted that blacks face a double barrier, racism on the outside and lack of investment that leads to “limited horizons” on the inside.

Such constraints are plain to Ademola Mandella, a 47-year-old fashion designer and hairstylist in New York City. He once owned three thriving salons in Brooklyn that rang up $800,000 in sales one year, although he never has been able to secure a bank loan for lack of collateral.

A move to Manhattan to serve better-off clientele--and make more money--left him in financial straits.

“If we weren’t watched so, and scrutinized so, this country could really be something,” Mandella said, shaking his head.

Or take the case of Mitchell Davie, a successful 45-year-old black entrepreneur who invested in buildings and a restaurant in a largely black Brooklyn neighborhood.

He built a paper empire of mortgages when banks wouldn’t stake business loans. Then the recession hit and, with scant hope of a bank bailout, he may lose it all.

“I kind of feel it would be better if I was a different hue,” Davie said.

“They’re not going to give me a business loan. That’s where the racism comes in,” he said. “They can always take my house, but to go in for a business loan, I just kind of feel there’s very little faith in that situation.’

Affirmative action may open doors, but many well-schooled and skilled blacks find their way into corporations blocked and, once inside, their advancement stymied.

“I have been doing this for 35 years and we still haven’t stretched near the halfway point down in the barrel,” said Richard Clarke, founder of a leading minority executive search firm based in New York. “There are more and more bright people coming out of college, bright-eyed and hopeful. . . . There are still more qualified blacks than there are jobs, believe me.”

These views are not shared, however, by many other Americans gripped by trouble and fear in these hard-luck times.

A Times Mirror Poll released in July and taken May 28-June 10, in the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots, found that 40% of Americans agreed the country has gone too far pushing equal rights, while 57% disagreed.

The best-known social deficit, because it gets so much horrified attention, is how much taxpayers spend looking after Americans too poor to look after themselves.

Slightly more than 30% of all blacks live in poverty--a number that has remained constant for two decades, according to a 1991 Population Reference Bureau report.

Another major expense that some equate with bigotry is the justice system.

“The perception that African-American males are dangerous by nature, and the fear that it leads to, is a social cost we’re paying for racism,” said Anthony Monteiro, a sociologist at Rutgers University.

One-quarter of black men and teen-agers end up behind bars, however briefly, in part because they face higher risks of suspicion, arrests and convictions with long prison terms than whites, Monteiro said.

Myths and stereotypes dog the most accomplished blacks.

Consider the wealth and breadth of black-owned businesses. Vibrant, if smaller versions, of majority enterprises, they are cable television and computer companies, defense contractors and car dealerships, funeral homes and insurance companies, groceries and gas stations, investment houses and entertainment empires, personal care product firms and oil refineries and publishing companies.

Black Enterprise magazine estimates that the 100 biggest black-owned businesses in the country brought in $7.9 billion in revenues in 1991.

The biggest single chunk went to TLC Beatrice International Holdings Inc. The New York-based food giant owned by Reginald F. Lewis yielded $1.5 billion in sales last year.

But even apparent successes are shadowed by those invisible walls, confining growth in another kind of inner city.

Carver Federal Savings Bank, the country’s richest black-owned financial institution, has $320 million in assets and eight branches around New York City.

Founded in Harlem in 1949 with a storefront office and one employee, it was born out of bias. Black GIs coming back from World War II eager to start families and own their own homes couldn’t get mortgages. The same banks that accepted their deposits told these men that they were bad credit risks.

The story is little different today, said Carver’s venerable 74-year-old president, Richard T. Greene.

“We’re functioning in a racist society,” Greene said. “We feel we have an extra responsibility to service our community and our people.”

Richard Clarke, whose corporate clients come seeking blacks for their top echelons, said this duty is not for blacks alone.

“Sometimes companies don’t realize they have a larger responsibility to the community that they serve, other than merely mouthing the proper words or sending a check to a charity,” Clarke said.

“It’s so important to give people an opportunity that all these kids are asking for,” he said, his voice suddenly choked with tears.

“They don’t know what it means,” he said, “when someone comes home, and says, ‘Mom, I’ve got a job.’ ”