According
to “The Road to Zero Wealth” report published by Prosperity Now
and the Institute for Policy Studies, the median wealth of black
Americans will fall to zero by 2053 if current trends continue.”
– Charlene
Rhinehart, Black Enterprise
84% of African American
believe the American Dream means financial security; 78% in not
living paycheck-to-paycheck; and 77% in owning a home. Yet, to many,
that American Dream is more and more simply fading away.
With the US set to become
“majority minority” by 2044, researchers say this spells major
economic peril for the nation. If the racial wealth divide continues
to accelerate, the economic conditions of black and Latino households
will have an increasingly adverse impact on the economy because the
majority of US households will no longer have enough wealth to stake
their claim in the middle class.
Of course, black Americans
started off generations behind. Efforts by black Americans to build
wealth can be traced back throughout American history. But these
efforts have been impeded in a host of ways. In the early-to-middle
20th century they encountered the redlining and racially restrictive
housing covenants which prevented the sale of many homes to black
Americans, and isolated them together in communities that lost value
as white residents fled to the suburbs.
Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, a
senior fellow at Prosperity Now, explains …
“The majority of
white Americans weren’t middle class until the 1930s or 40s. Then
there was mass investment to create an American middle class – but
it was a white American middle class.”
(Jamiles Lartey.
“Median wealth of black Americans 'will fall to zero by 2053',
warns new report.”
The Guardian. September 13, 2017.)
The racial wealth gap is
the result of systematic disadvantages that African-Americans face on
a regular basis. Only sustained, large and targeted policy
interventions will help turn the tide toward equality. History has
painted a bleak picture of advancement.
“This history matters
for contemporary inequality in part because its legacy is passed down
generation-to-generation through unequal monetary inheritances which
make up a great deal of current wealth. In 2020 Americans are
projected to inherit about $765 billion in gifts and bequests,
excluding wealth transfers to spouses and transfers that support
minor children. Inheritances account for roughly 4 percent of annual
household income, much of which goes untaxed by the U.S. government.”
(Kriston
McIntosh, Emily Moss, Ryan Nunn, and Jay Shambaugh.
“Examining
the Black-white wealth gap.” Brookings. February 27, 2020.)
Brookings found evidence
of staggering racial disparities in 2016. Then, at $171,000, the net
worth of a typical white family was nearly ten times greater than
that of a Black family ($17,150). Gaps in wealth between black and
white households reveal the effects of accumulated inequality and
discrimination, as well as differences in power and opportunity that
can be traced back to this nation’s inception. The Black-white
wealth gap reflects a society that has not and does not afford
equality of opportunity to all its citizens.
“The
average white man earns $2.7 million over a lifetime, while the
average black man earns $1.8 million and the average Hispanic man
earns $2.0 million.”
– Melissa
Favreault, Urban Institute's tabulations from the 2008 Survey of
Income and Program Participation matched to Summary Earnings Records
through 2012
What Can Be Done?
Jabari Simama, retired
President of Georgia Piedmont Technical College and Deputy Chief
Operating Officer of Development and Chief of Staff in DeKalb County,
believes Ameria must close the achievement gap in education with
whites and aid African Americans in obtaining job skills in
high-demand careers such as advanced manufacturing, medical coding,
welding and more. This would go a long way toward addressing the
school-to-prison pipeline that traps so many African American males.
Simama supports reform on
the state level in which public officials conduct a bipartisan,
comprehensive review of all policies to determine if they promote or
impact systematic racism. This includes a review of right-to-work
laws to ascertain their impact on workers' wages and protections,
partisan restrictions that impact citizens' right to vote – such as
racially motivated redistricting, voter ID laws, eliminating polling
places, and refusing to let felons who have paid their debt to
society vote all contribute to systematic racism.
Public officials should
also advance programs that deal with poverty at its roots, starting
with analyzing returns on investments from tax abatements for
economic development to see if the foregone revenues might better be
utilized to lift more residents from poverty. This includes help so
that minorities can become homeowners.
And finally, African
Americans will never escape from poverty and find economic security
until they have comprehensive health care that is separate from their
employment – the pandemic has proven the importance of us all
having health care for the benefit of society as a whole.
A report by the Insight
Center, a national research and economic justice organization, warns
of merely fixating on the gap, but instead creating “policies that
address the precarity of work, establish protections that help people
weather unforeseen upheavals, build up wealth and promote social
freedoms, and prioritize the well-being of the public at large rather
than the interests of the wealthy few ... a system that disallows
private interests from distorting the influence of government,
politics, and policymaking.”
Anne Price, president of
the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, explains …
“Ultimately, a new
racial-wealth framework – one that centers the root of racial
wealth inequality rather than fixating on the gap – will create a
broader opportunity to tackle the structure of our economy while also
taking a hard and honest look at what freedom and dignity mean today
and what they could mean for all of us, especially Black people. We
must seize the moment to think big and dismantle anti-Blackness, the
foundational architecture of the rules that maintain racial
oppression and economic exclusion today. Without being intentional in
grappling with the strong role it plays in shaping most economic
policies, we will continue to be unsuccessful in advancing economic
solutions that both rectify the failings of the past and help
everyone thrive in the future.”
(Anne Price, “Don't
Fixate On the Racial Wealth Gap: Focus on Undoing Its Root Causes.”
Roosevelt Institute. February 2020.)
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