Racial wealth divide

60 Years After March On Washington, Black Economic Inequality Persists

August 28, 2023 Chuck Collins, Inequality.org. Educate! Black America, Class Struggle, Racial disparities, Racial wealth divide

Black Americans have endured the unendurable for too long. Sixty years after the famed March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his landmark “I Have a Dream” speech, African Americans are on a path where it will take 500 more years to reach economic equality. A new report, Still A Dream, coauthored by Institute for Policy Studies and the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, examines the economic indicators since 1963. Our country has taken significant steps towards racial equity since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s.

Economic Justice Rally Pushes For City Level Reparations

July 9, 2020 Unicorn Riot. Create! Black America, Minnesota, Racial wealth divide, Reparations

St. Paul, MN – After weeks of intense protests following the murder of George Floyd by police, Minnesota organizers are pushing legislative changes to bring forth justice for the Black community. One of those items is a bill that would distribute reparations for descendants of slaves in Minnesota’s capital city of Saint Paul. The St. Paul Recovery Act, spearheaded by Minnesota Green Party spokesman Trahern Crews and Ward 7 city councilor Jane Prince, is what the pair call “economic justice“. The Recovery Act was created out of H.R. 40 which was passed in 2019 by Congress and commissioned research on discrimination against freed slaves, the role of the government in slavery and the development of proposals for reparations.

Report: White Supremacy Is A Pre-Existing Condition

June 24, 2020 By Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Chuck Collins, and Omar Ocampo, Institute for Policy Studies. Educate! COVID-19, Inequality, Racial wealth divide, Racism

For months now, a deadly pandemic and deep recession have pummeled the U.S. economy. Yet even as tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs, U.S. billionaires saw their collective wealth increase by leaps and bounds. At the same time, the Movement for Black Lives has drawn attention not just to police brutality against Black Americans, but to systemic racism more broadly. A huge cause and consequence of that systemic injustice is the underlying racial wealth divide — the financial legacy of centuries of white supremacy. Even before the pandemic, we found that median white families had literally dozens of times the net worth of median Black and Latino families. The pandemic is supercharging that inequality, with the skyrocketing wealth of the largely white billionaire class putting most Americans, especially people of color, further and further behind.

US Racism’s $13 Trillion Legacy Is Just The Start

June 20, 2020 Anna Szymanski, Reuters. Educate! Racial wealth divide, Reparations, Slavery, wealth inequality

New York - Around the time the United States formally abolished slavery in 1865, African Americans owned 0.5% of the United States’ wealth. Today they own under 3%, even though around 13% of the population is defined by the U.S. census as “black or African American.” This isn’t an accident of history – it’s a result of government policies and institutional bias. The interest keeps compounding. The value of income lost during slavery is staggering. The U.S. practice lasted for nearly 250 years – almost equivalent to the time from the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 until today. University of Connecticut Professor Thomas Craemer estimates the present value of unpaid wages for just the 89 years after independence to be nearly $20 trillion using a 3% interest rate.

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