Injustice

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.