In 1967, with the Civil Rights movement still in full swing and
Jim Crow still looming in the rearview mirror, median household income
was 43% higher for white, non-Hispanic households than for black
households. But things changed dramatically over the next half century,
as legal segregation faded into history. By 2011, median white household
income was 72% higher than median black household income, according to a Census report from that year [PDF].
To say that economic inequality is still a heavily racialized
phenomenon, even a generation after the end of the Civil Rights era,
would be an understatement. Yet both major parties continue to discuss
inequality in largely color-blind terms, only hinting at the role played
by race.
The trend is even more startling when one looks at median household
wealth instead of yearly income. In 1984, the white-to-black wealth
ratio was 12-to-1, according to Pew Research Center.
By 1995, the chasm had narrowed until median white income had only a
5-to-1 advantage over black income. But over the next 14 years the
wealth gap began to grow once again, until it had skyrocketed up to
19-to-1 in 2009.
Yet even a recent 204-page analysis of the federal War on Poverty,
spearheaded by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., gives only passing mentions to
racial disparity. In the first section of the report, which purports to
explain the causes of modern poverty, Ryan and his co-authors bring up
race only twice: Once to identify “the breakdown of the familiy as a key
cause of poverty within the black community,” citing Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, and again to applaud the narrowing of the “achievement gap”
between white and black schoolchildren. Weeks later, during a radio
appearance, Ryan said poverty is in part to blame on the fact that “inner cities” have a culture of “men not working.”
President Obama went a step forward in December’s major address on inequality, when he noted that “the
painful legacy of discrimination means that African Americans, Latinos,
Native Americans are far more likely to suffer from a lack of
opportunity—higher unemployment, higher poverty rates.” Yet that
amounted to a footnote in a speech that also included the line, “The
opportunity gap in America is now as much about class as it is about
race.”
“I think it doesn’t make for good politics,” said Color of
Change executive director Rashad Robinson of the racial wealth gap.
“It’s messy and requires us to be deep and think about much bigger and
more long-term solutions than Washington’s oftentimes willing to deal
with.”
Yet in a serious discussion about American inequality, the
subject of race is essentially unavoidable. That’s because most of the
pipelines to a higher economic class—such as employment and
homeownership—are “oftentimes not equally accessible to black folks,”
said Robinson.
Disparities in homeownership are a major driver of the racial wealth gap,
according to a recent study from Brandeis University. According to the
authors of the report, “redlining [a form of discrimination in banking
or insurance practices], discriminatory mortgage-lending practices, lack
of access to credit, and lower incomes have blocked the homeownership
path for African-Americans while creating and reinforcing communities
segregated by race.”
Many of the black families that have successfully battled their way
to homeownership over the past few decades saw their nest eggs get
pulverized by the 2008 financial collapse. The Brandeis researchers
found that “half the collective wealth of African-American families was
stripped away during the Great Recession,” in large part due to the
collapse of the housing market and the subsequent explosion in the
nationwide foreclosure rate.
Similarly, employment discrimination has done its part to ensure that
black unemployment remains twice as high as white unemployment—a ratio
that has stayed largely consistent since the mid-1950s. National Bureau of Economy Research fellows have found that resumes are significantly less likely to get a positive response from potential employers if the applicants have names that are more common in the black community. And an arrest for even a non-violent drug offense can haunt a job applicant for the rest of his life;
combined with the fact that black people are nearly four times more
likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites, despite
using the drug at roughly the same rate, criminal background checks have
helped to fuel racial inequity in job hiring...
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