Let's Talk Privilege
Wealth builds
on wealth. The cultural, political, and institutional barriers for black families to accrue wealth has resulted in drastic differences between the median income
for white and black families today.
The median income for white families is 171,000 where it is only 17,600 for black families (2016)
This stark difference is also shown in families with equal income levels:
"Wealth is the sum of resources available to a household at a point in time; as such it is clearly influenced by the income of a household, but the two are not perfectly correlated. Two households can have the same income, but the household with fewer expenses, or with more accumulated wealth from past income or inheritances, will have more wealth ...What is immediately evident is that the racial wealth gap remains even for families with the same income. For those in the top 10 percent by income (only 3.6 percent Black), the racial wealth gap is still quite large: median net worth for white families in this income group is $1,789,300 versus $343,160 for Black families."
The largest factors affecting generational wealth are education and home ownership
"...children’s educational success accounted for about 25 percent of the similarity of wealth between parents and children. Homeownership accounted for 28 percent of that relationship and marriage accounted for 14 percent."
This information was found by, "Pfeffer, a sociologist in the Survey Research Center at the Institute for Social Research, and co-author Harvard sociologist Alexandra Killewald examined five traditional avenues of wealth transmission—education, marriage, homeownership, business ownership and receipt of financial gifts or bequests. Their study is published in the journal Social Forces."
We have shown that the struggle for quality education for children of color is still on going under the page access to education on this website. As for home ownership, the historical barriers for people of color to buy a house were tremendous. One study showed"About half the African-American grandparents in the study were homeowners in the 1960s, compared to 82 percent of white grandparents. But two generations later, rates of homeownership were higher for white grandchildren of those who did not own homes than for African-Americans whose grandparents owned homes."
"The civil rights movement was decades ago, the issue is no longer structural. Black people have just as many opportunities as everyone else. If they aren't making good financial moves thats not society's problem."
Wealth grows exponentially from generation to generation. The historical legal and societal barriers for people of color to accrue wealth through just housing and education alone are not something that could be solved in a few decades. These barriers are also not something we've left in the past. Throughout this website we have scrapped the top of only four categories of oppression that continue to hold back further prosperity for people of color. This excerpt from the paper 'The Political Economy of Education, Financial Literacy, and the Racial Wealth Gap' addresses this mindset:
"...race is a stronger predictor of wealth than class itself. For instance, Blacks and Latinos collectively make up about 30 percent of the U.S. population, but collectively they own about 7 percent of the nation’s private wealth (Bruenig, 2013).
Despite these enormous disparities, the public sentiment seems to be that the civil rights period has largely addressed major racial structural barriers. This sentiment is coupled with the notions that Blacks need to “stop making excuses” and, ultimately, “take personal responsibility” for their low socioeconomic position. It is this trope that particularly emphasizes a group-based under-appreciation and underinvestment in personal and human capital development on the part of Blacks. If Blacks (and other subaltern communities of color, such as Native Americans, Mexicans, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, and Vietnamese) simply would reverse their self-sabotaging attitudes and behaviors, full equality could be achieved (Aja et al., 2014).
By defining the central problem facing the Black community as not the deep-seated structures that perpetuate racism, but rather deficiencies internal to Blacks themselves, the focus of policy would become the rehabilitation of the Black family as opposed to addressing ongoing structural barriers such as inadequate capital finance endowment (Aja et al., 2014)."
PODCASTS TO TRY FOR FURTHER UNDERSTANDING:
Check out The Race and Wealth Podcast Network
They have lots of interesting episode topics from a variety of shows including how COVID19 is disproportionately affecting People of Color, the wealth gap and the virtual economy, and white supremacy as a pre-existing condition.
Check out the new season of The Pay Check: More than 150 years after the end of slavery in the U.S., the net worth of a typical white family is nearly six times greater than that of the average Black family. Season 3 of The Pay Check digs into into how we got to where we are today and what can be done to narrow the yawning racial wealth gap in the U.S.