Several years ago, I learned something
that changed my entire view of the world. The wealth of the median
white family in America is 10 times higher than that of the median
black family. 10 times. That's not a typo, that's literally
the truth. I always knew racial wealth inequality was really bad, but
I never ever thought it could possibly be that bad. It really helps
to show how dramatic racial injustice in this country and in this
world is.
In 2016, the wealth of the median
white family was $171,000, while the wealth of the median black
family was $17,409. The wealth of the median Hispanic family wasn't
much better at $20,920. According to the Economic Policy Institute,
"More than one in four black households have zero or negative
net worth." For every $100 owned by white families, black
families own just $5.04.
And it's getting even worse. Black and
Latino households are projected to lose even more wealth in the
coming years, while white households will likely gain wealth.
Astoundingly, in just two years, in 2020 the median white family is
projected to have 86 times more wealth than the median black
family, and 68 times more wealth than the median Hispanic
family.
How is this possible? What has
happened to make white people so unbelievably more wealthy than
minorities?
A whole lot of it has to do with
housing. For the median household in America, two-thirds of all their
wealth is in housing equity. In other words, for most families most
of their wealth is tied up in their home.
The history of housing in this country
has brought us to where we are now. The past, present, and future of
housing in America has been defined by racism, segregation, and mass
injustice. Minorities have been purposefully and systematically
pushed down by the system in all forms of life, and this has
especially been seen in housing.
We all know about the Civil Rights
Movement of the mid-20th century and its unbelievable successes, but
what we learn about is not the full story. While public segregation
was ended, the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act were passed,
schools were integrated, and the Great Society program and
affirmative action were put into place, other things were happening
at the same time that did as much, or even more, to hurt minorities
in America as everything the Civil Rights Movement did to help.
Housing and community settlement are a very important part of that
story.
In the 1950s and 1960s,
suburbanization and white flight swept America. Many people,
especially white people, moved to the suburbs and new neighborhoods
towards the edges and outside of towns and cities. With this, the
money and wealth left the inner cities, and left the starving,
decaying cities that have defined American urban life from the 1970s
onward.
Through all of this, the wealth gap
between whites and minorities was dramatically transformed for the
worse, even as the Civil Rights Movement was more publicly changing
other things for the better.
Beginning in the 1930s, under the New
Deal the federal government began taking great efforts to make home
ownership more accessible for Americans. This in itself was a very
good thing. However, racism made it so that the process was good for
white people and very, very bad for blacks and minorities. The
centerpiece of the housing program was loan programs that helped
millions of Americans afford a home for the first time. However, the
system used color-coded maps, where green represented "good"
neighborhoods and red represented "bad" neighborhoods.
Those in red areas were prevented from participating in the program.
And in an already highly segregated society, with "black"
parts of town in every city and town in the country, and with racism
ruling every area of power and law, no matter if it was in the North
or the South, or whether it was the federal government or state
governments, the maps were very much drawn along racial lines.
As a result, under this program from
1934 to 1962, 98% of the home loans went to white families. The
federal government invested $120 billion in these loans, and almost
all of it went to making white people richer and leaving everybody
else behind.
Following World War II, the government
helped bring about the construction of millions of new homes, which
were mostly in the suburbs. This was when the wave of suburbanization
took over the country. It was all fueled by the home loan programs of
the Federal Housing Administration that started in the 1930s, but
since blacks and minorities were almost entirely excluded from these
programs, they were shut out from suburbanization. As a result, a
massive social program that had the potential to be a truly
unbelievable force for good, ended up being a poisoned illusion that
helped white people at the great expense of everyone else.
Everything in the system and in
society kept minorities from enjoying the great benefits and rewards
of this transformation, and kept them out of the new homes. "FHA
underwriting guidelines," according to the Oxford Research
Encyclopedia, "explicitly required racial segregation until the
early 1950s." Furthermore, all of the new neighborhoods almost
uniformly excluded blacks or made it very difficult for minorities to
move there, even if they managed to secure a loan or otherwise had
the finances. Every level of the system, from real estate agents to
the neighborhood associations to racist laws to state and federal
officials, worked against minorities being included. The Oxford
Research Encyclopedia states, "White suburbanites in concert
with other crucial players- including government- created a web of
discrimination that secured links between race, social advantage, and
metropolitan space. Mechanisms of segregation included collusion by
real estate brokers, homebuilders and lenders, discriminatory federal
housing guidelines, local neighborhood associations, municipal land
use controls, and the threat of violence."
That was the other thing: on top of
everything else, whites carried out violence and intimidation against
blacks and minorities in order to keep them out of white
neighborhoods and the suburbs. In addition to the thousands of
lynchings that took place throughout America, in both the South and
the North, through the decades, white people carried out racial
violence specifically related to housing concerns. According to
Gregory Smithsimon, associate professor of sociology at Brooklyn
College, "What is sometimes called the ghetto, a large, almost
entirely African American neighborhood near the center of many US
cities, is a creation of violence. As African Americans moved to
northern cities during the Great Migration of the late 19th and early
20th centuries, they were kept out of many areas and squeezed into
increasingly crowded, poorly maintained neighborhoods. In city after
city in America, in the 1920s, white resentment of the growing black
population boiled over into race riots in which white citizens and
police attacked, beat, and killed black residents, damaged black
businesses, and burned black homes and institutions."
This continued throughout the decades
and through the period of mass suburbanization. From the Oxford
Research Encyclopedia, "Added to the barriers of institutional
racism, recent historical studies suggest that acts of violence and
intimidation against non-white neighbors- including arson, bombings,
death threats, and mob assaults- numbered in the hundreds in the
decades after World War II. In the Chicago suburb of Cicero, for
instance, rumors that a black family had rented a local apartment in
1951 provoked a mob to ransack the building."
Through all of these ways, the white
establishment prevented blacks and minorities from being part of the
housing boom. As a result, white families received millions of nice
new homes with government support, and this greatly increased the
wealth inequality between whites and minorities that already existed.
When you look at it, you realize that while being quite complicated,
it's also very simple. This happened just a couple generations ago,
and white families have largely passed down the homes and wealth from
that time. Since most of the wealth of an average family is in their
home, the housing story explains so simply why white families are so
much more wealthy than black families.
As white people and the wealthy moved
to the suburbs, they took their wealth with them. The wealth of
communities, which had previously been concentrated in the cities,
flowed increasingly to the suburbs. Downtown was no longer the heart
of a community; now it was the suburban shopping mall. With public
services being largely funded by property taxes, poor communities
inherently suffer from worse public services due to a smaller tax
base. Furthermore, the increasingly poor, largely minority
communities in the inner cities were always going to be ignored and
abused by policymakers and officials. As the cities suffered
ever-increasing poverty, neglect, and worsening services, schools,
and infrastructure, the middle class and whites fled more and more to
the suburbs. In the suburbs, where all the wealth was now, commercial
investments skyrocketed and businesses moved there more and more.
Through all of this, property values in the suburbs soared. And all
of those white families in the suburbs were now much richer along
with that, simply by the virtue of having their largest investment
and wealth holding, their homes, being in the right geographic space.
At the same time, minorities and the
poor were left further and further behind. As expressed by PBS,
"Meanwhile, African Americans and Latinos, largely confined to
the inner city, saw their neighborhoods decline as urban renewal
destroyed available housing and cut freeways through the heart of
their communities...Denied home loans, many remained renters and were
not able to accumulate wealth through home equity. Those who were
able to purchase homes saw their property values stagnate or fall
since 80% of the market, the white population, refused to buy in
their neighborhoods. As whites left, so too did grocery stores and
services and many of these communities fell into a cycle of decline."
The inner cities, formerly the hub of the community, the thriving
central metropolis where parades, festivals, and restaurants brought
everyone together, became the dumping ground for the unrestrainable
excesses of empire capitalism. The city was now "where the
blacks and Hispanics lived," and society treated them exactly as
it desired to treat these people. The inner cities are our trashcans,
our landfills. As PBS shows, "The community that hits rock
bottom is further susceptible to the placement of highways, prisons,
waste storage, toxic facilities, etc."
All along the way, the city, state,
and federal government have not only done nothing to stop this
ever-spiraling cycle, but have actively encouraged it and used their
great powers to carry out this process. We have a greatly poisoned
society, a system that does everything in its power to push down
those that are down and raise up those that are on top. Our power
establishment very much carries this out.
Through all of this, while the Civil
Rights Movement was transforming some things for the better on the
front pages, evil was winning greater victories in areas that
probably mattered even more. For while the Civil Rights Movement was
an incredible achievement, a deeply inspiring force for good that
showed the power of the human spirit and the potential for people to
make a difference, it and the other progressive movements of the time
were always fighting an uphill battle against the ever-swelling
monster of global capitalism. Wealth and power are where things are
really changed, and while everyone was seeing the hard-fought
struggles and successes of the Civil Rights Movement, the foundations
of the great divergence between white and minority wealth were being
laid in the areas of housing and community settlement. This period of
time saw the outright victory of the forces of evil in making blacks
and minorities much poorer and whites much richer, and it should be
known for that just as much as it is known for the Civil Rights
Movement. And yet nobody knows about any of this, they only know the
rosy picture that is painted to serve the interests of the status
quo, the ascensionist narrative where everything is always getting
better, where society is an ever-increasing march towards progress
and liberalization, where time as a matter of course moves towards
greater progressiveness and goodness, where racism is in the past,
where the ending of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement fixed
everything. I barely knew about any of this before I learned about it
some in college and I looked into it myself.
The ways in which the areas of housing
and community settlement have been used to oppress minorities and the
poor over the last few decades, and exalt white people and the rich,
are incredibly detailed and vast. I do not begin to understand all
the complexities of zoning, "urban renewal," city services,
highways and roadways, taxes, city power, eminent domain, real
estate, and court systems, and how they have all been used to push
down the disfavored people and neighborhoods. But I do know that in
every town and city across the country, there will be a unique story
of the history of their housing and community settlement that
encompasses all of this, and while it will have different details in
all the different places, it will always be a familiar story. It is a
story of the power establishment capitalizing on the housing gap and
pushing minorities and the poor farther and farther down, to the
material benefit of the white and the wealthy, and driving us as a
community further and further apart. It is a story of mass injustice.
The college that I went to,
Christopher Newport University, holds an example of this legacy in
its roots. When the city of Newport News was first looking to build a
campus for the new college in the early 1960s, they moved out an old
black neighborhood in order to get their land. This was despite
several other potential locations being readily available, with none
of them requiring destroying and moving out a neighborhood, and being
just as favorable in all other respects. In fact, the main rival
location was about half as expensive as the one they chose. The site
they chose, a sixty-acre tract of land along Shoe Lane, had been
valued by the city's own tax office at $235,000. The other main
choice that was in the running was a sixty-acre tract of land along
Roy's Lane, only a mile up Warwick Boulevard from the Shoe Lane site.
The Roy's Lane site was valued at $121,000.
Several other sites had been
eliminated from the running primarily because of cost. And yet the
city chose the Shoe Lane site, and stuck to it, despite fierce
community opposition from the Shoe Lane neighborhood to being moved
out of their homes, and from the black community in Newport News at
large, despite it being twice as expensive, despite there being other
readily available options.
Clearly, something else was going on
here. The truth is, the Shoe Lane neighborhood, a black neighborhood
where many of the families had lived for almost a hundred years, was
very close to the all-white James River Country Club, "one of
the Peninsula's oldest and most exclusive country clubs." In the
1950s and early 1960s, several middle-class black families began
moving out of the downtown area and into the Shoe Lane neighborhood,
as well as along two adjacent roadways. This was the real motivation
for choosing the Shoe Lane site, the city wanted to protect the James
River Country Club, the surrounding wealthy white neighborhoods, and
their little world. This section of the city was predominantly white,
and they had no place for an expanding black neighborhood right in
their midst, right near the country club.
In 1954, the city had already proposed
taking the Shoe Lane site, "for education purposes."
Clearly, the city had their designs set for years on stealing the
land from the families that lived there. In fact, in 1961, when the
city first publicly expressed interest in taking the Shoe Lane site,
the city council gave three possibilities for how the land would be
used: for public recreation, for a new public school building, or for
Christopher Newport College. Clearly, they wanted the land, and they
were going to find some reason to take it, even if they ended up
putting Christopher Newport College somewhere else.
But the city eventually did take the
Shoe Lane site for Christopher Newport College. After a long
controversial process, with a great uproar and public opposition from
the residents of the Shoe Lane neighborhood and the black community,
underhanded and corrupt politics from the perpetrators of this
injustice prevailed, and the city seized the land from the homeowners
through "condemnation," and as a last injustice, paid the
families far-below market price. The Shoe Lane neighborhood was no
more, and the city had their college. That land is where Christopher
Newport University still stands today, where I went to school, where
I studied and slept and went to classes. James River Country Club is
still there, right down the road.
This is just one example of the
millions of stories that played out across the country throughout the
20th century, and continue to be played out in the 21st century.
Housing is an area where right-wing forces have continued to achieve
victory after victory, largely unhampered, largely unnoticed. It is
an area that has very much escaped public notice and attention, and
the forces of evil have their way, evicting families without a penny,
tearing down neighborhoods, silencing dreams. Even through the
housing crisis and financial crash and Great Recession, none of it
was explained to us in a way that made much of a difference for
anyone's understanding of the history and identity of housing and
community settlement in America.
And all of this has just been getting
worse and worse the last few decades. From 1983 to 2013, the wealth
of the median black family declined 75 percent, and the wealth of the
median Hispanic family declined 50 percent.
Our public schools are more segregated
now than they were decades ago. According to the Washington Post, the
public schools in America are more segregated now than they were 40
years ago, which was right after integration really truly began. And
it is getting even worse. Formal school segregation isn't really
needed by the forces of racism when where we live in our communities
is already extremely segregated.
As stated by PBS, in the supplementary
materials for the documentary Race: The Power of an Illusion,
"According to the Lewis Mumford Center at the University of
Albany, segregation has increased in almost every large suburban area
from 1990 to 2000." Furthermore, "Across the nation, four
out of five whites live outside of the cities and 86 percent of
whites live in neighborhoods where minorities make up less than 1
percent of the population. In contrast, 70 percent of blacks and
Latinos live in the cities or inner-ring suburbs." That was
written in 2003, but the figures are likely pretty comparable today.
In Boston in 2018, the racial wealth
gap is especially pronounced. The median household net worth is
$247,000 for whites in Boston, and $8 for blacks. Literally 8
dollars. That is 30,875 times less. The median household net
worth for Dominican families in Boston is even worse: $0.
In America, as I said above, the
wealth of the median white family is 10 times higher than the wealth
of the median black family. However, the People's Policy Project
thinks the real situation is even worse. While the Federal Reserve
includes the family car in their data for the total wealth of a
household, the People's Policy Project argues that this is
misleading, since cars decline so much in value over their life. In
typical accounts, cars are not even included as wealth.
According to Professor Edward Wolff,
says the People's Policy Project, "It would be better to use a
wealth concept that excludes these kind of consumer durables, as they
are not readily convertible to cash, their consumption value
typically far outweighs their resale value, and they are not
generally regarded as wealth." When you remove cars from the
data, the situation is even worse. Without the car included, the
median white family in America has a wealth of $140,600. The median
black family has a wealth of $4,160. Thus, when you take cars out of
the equation, the median white family has more than 33 times more
wealth than the median black family.
Racism, all by itself, makes black
people and minorities poorer than white people, due to housing
economics. The exact same home owned by a white family will be worth
more than if owned by a black family. This is because of racism and
white flight. White flight has occurred very often through the
decades and continues to occur consistently when blacks and
minorities move into neighborhoods. Almost inevitably, even a single
minority family can create a chain reaction of white flight. Since
white flight happens so often and has happened so often in the past,
people are well aware of the phenomenon. Due to racism and an
awareness of our housing reality (that is the way it is because of
racism), white people tend to be wary of what happens "when the
blacks and minorities start moving into your neighborhood." Even
if someone is not really racist themselves, when a minority family
moves into their neighborhood, they might consider moving out because
they know that other people will
probably be racist enough to move out. And once more and more people
start leaving, the property values of the homes begin to fall,
especially when other minorities begin moving into the neighborhood.
So in order to get ahead of the curve, many people will consider
selling and moving out while their property value is still at the
same level, even if they might not be particularly racist themselves
at all. And racism is very very widespread. So it can take very
little to set off the chain reaction of white flight.
White
people make up about 60 percent of the total population of the United
States. Many, or most, white people are not in demand for homes owned
by minorities or homes in minority neighborhoods. As a result, a
majority of the population is usually out of the market for those
homes. Since demand helps to drive price, especially in such an
arbitrarily-priced realm as real estate, this dramatically alters the
value of homes owned by minorities. This is why the exact
same home owned by a white
family will be worth less if it's owned by a minority family. And
since most of a family's wealth is tied up in their home, racism
itself literally makes blacks
and minorities poorer.
And as we've
already seen, the black and minority populations do not own the same
homes as the white population. The homes owned by the minority
population are way way less valuable and less desirable, due to the
history of everything that has come before. So even if a minority
family owns the same home as a white family, it will be worth less,
and society has purposefully and systematically ensured that
minorities own worse homes that are worth less at face value.
Learning about all
of this is really important because it helps to show how directly and
powerfully racism has disadvantaged blacks and minorities. The
suffering today of minorities in America is not just the result of
some vague legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, although those hundreds of
years of history are super super important too. But so often we
identify the problems of racism today as just the result of the
historical legacy, and we don't have a really good understanding of
how racism today is as actively as always destroying the lives of all
of us. And it's because we aren't taught about it. The truth is kept
from all of us.
Part of the
problem is that with what we learn about racism and its history, and
how we learn about it, we all come to think that a whole lot of it
was fixed during the Civil Rights Movement. Even though most of us
completely understand that racism is very much alive today, we are
taught to see it as a more nebulous force that is less easy to
concretely identify its direct negative role today. We all,
including me, so deeply think that racism is a lot better
today. And this is simply not true. It's a sign of how terrible
things are in our society that we think that since black people are
no longer our slaves, or can literally drink at the same water
fountain as us, that everything is okay. In fact, as capitalism has
continued to so deeply destroy everything, at an accelerating rate
over the last few decades, the effects of racism in this context are
probably worse than they have ever been before, especially on a
global level.
Since we are given
a stopping point in our minds with the Civil Rights Movement, with
the way we are taught things, it is difficult to see the history of
racism as a continuous thing, as being the exact same thing in our
past and present. That is what the power establishment always does,
it co-opts a positive thing or a progressive thing and uses it to its
advantage. The power establishment claims that because we saw the end
of formal slavery in America, because we saw the Civil Rights
Movement, everything has been fixed and we are on a triumphant march
towards flawlessness. If there hadn't been the shining example of the
Civil Rights Movement, it would probably be easier for us to connect
racism in our present back through history and see it as the same
force, not diluted in the slightest. However, if there hadn't been
the Civil Rights Movement, things would be even worse than they are
now, and we might not even have a formalized, societally universal
understanding of racism at all, so the power establishment wins
either way. It is always an uphill battle, and thank goodness we had
the Civil Rights Movement.
Learning about the
racial wealth gap that exists today and learning about why it is this
way is really helpful because it helps to show how the level of
suffering faced by minorities today is absolutely, unimpeachably the
result of racism. It helps to show how directly racism makes
minorities poorer. The majority of wealth for a family is based in
the home they own, and a couple generations ago the federal
government essentially gave millions of white people nice new homes
and kept minorities completely out of the process. White people were
already at an extreme advantage in this country, and this just
completely multiplied that. The white population has passed down that
wealth to the people today, and compounded on the advantage by using
the massive head start to build greater wealth through being much
more able to go to college, through investment, through being able to
withstand crisis and hardship with the financial security, through
financial opportunity being much more available in their communities.
At the same time, all along the way the government has made sure that
black people and minorities have been kept in their box, in their
sections of the city, and done everything in its power to keep them
from joining in the flourishing world of white people and their
neighborhoods. The government has torn down neighborhoods, rezoned
cities, divided areas with interstates and highways, underfunded
schools, underfunded services, cheated minority families forced out
of their homes by paying them below-market values, allowed predatory
mortgage and bank practices, allowed discriminatory real-estate
practices, allowed discriminatory practices of so many forms,
encouraged community segregation, built prisons and landfills and
factories and nuclear power plants and waste sites in certain
places, redrawn electoral lines, reshaped entire cities, put in
place voter ID laws, killed and attacked thousands of minorities
through the police, over-policed communities, jailed millions of
minorities- punished way more severely at much higher rates for the
same crimes, ignored entire communities, ignored entire cities,
allowed deathly polluted water, allowed broken roads and broken
electricity systems and food deserts and broken homes, taught lies
and covered up the real history and the truth through what is taught
in school, ruled unjustly in so so many court cases, civil and
criminal, written discriminatory laws, written the tax code the way
it is, kept minimum wage so low, encouraged private schools, ushered
in charter schools and the privatization of the school system,
carried out the privatization of the government itself, underfunded
social welfare, written discriminatory immigration laws, created a
very exploitative immigration system and landscape, deported millions
of people, attacked protesters, attacked innocent people, encouraged
suburbanization, favored the suburbs in so many ways, literally flown
cocaine into Los Angeles through the CIA, encouraged drug epidemics,
ignored poverty, ignored suffering, and written inheritance law the
way it is, all for this purpose. We as a society have done all of
these things and so much more, all to keep minorities down.
Learning about all
of this helps you to see that the racial wealth gap and the way
things are today is the result of an intentional process, carried out
by the government and the power establishment. It is not the result
of an accident or random circumstance. White people have been made
more powerful and literally made more wealthy by the government, and
the system has made sure that this has stayed that way and gotten
more and more dramatic.
When you learn
about all of this, you see better how racism is an active force. It
is hard to ignore the financial and real-world power of racism when
you learn that the same home owned by a minority family is worth less
than the exact same home owned by a white family. Beyond anything
else, that alone means that racism itself makes minority people
poorer. If a home is normally worth $200,000 in the hands of a white
family, if the value is reduced to $170,000 if it is owned by a black
family, racism itself literally made them $30,000 less wealthy. And
that is an accurate scenario. The home-valuation gap has been found
to be 18% on average, so in that situation racism would have stolen $36,000 from
the black family.
I said earlier
that the wealth of the median white family is 10 times higher than
the wealth of the median black family. However, a different study
found the situation to be way, way worse. The analysis conducted by
the People's Policy Project found the wealth of the median white
family to be 33 times higher than the wealth of the median black
family. And a report from the Institute for Policy Studies and
Prosperity Now found that the gap is way worse still, if that is even
possible. The report, "The Road to Zero Wealth," found that
in 2013, the wealth of the median black family was $1,700, the wealth
of the median Latino family was $2,000, and the wealth of the median
white family was $116,800. This means that the wealth of the median
white family is actually 69 times that of the median black
family, and 58 times that of the median Latino family.
The wealth of the
average black family and the average Hispanic family has been
steadily declining over the last few decades, and this is expected to
continue into the future. This is how, in just two years, in 2020 the
median white household is expected to own 86 times the wealth of the
median black household, and 68 times the wealth of the median
Hispanic household.
As time goes on,
if these trends continue, it will get worse and worse. By 2024,
median white household wealth is projected to be 99 times that of
median black household wealth, and 75 times that of median Latino
household wealth. Unbelievably, by 2053 median black household wealth
is expected to hit zero. That is, $0. That same year, median
white household wealth is projected to be $137,000. By 2073, median
Hispanic household wealth is projected to hit zero. In 2073, median
white household wealth is projected to be $147,000.
This is why, in
reality, the problems of racism are as bad as they have ever been,
and are possibly worse than ever before. And it is getting even
worse. When you look at the racial wealth gap, it is so bad, I don't
know how it could possibly get worse. I feel that way if the correct
statistic is that the median white family has 10 times the wealth of
the median black family. And the truth is that the median white
family has 69 times the wealth of the median black family.
