Racial wealth gap isn't black & white
New study insists it’s not a zero-sum game; it’s about ensuring a level playing field for all
A new study from the Roosevelt Institute urges an attack on the entrenched historical, political biases that have produced a racial wealth gap, not just surfaces solutions. (Shutterstock)
By Ted Cox
A new study on the racial wealth gap charges that reformers are missing the forest for the trees on the issue and urges an attack on the historic causes at the root of the problem.
Anne Price’s study for the Roosevelt Institute, published Wednesday, suggests quite clearly in its title: “Don’t Fixate on the Racial Wealth Gap: Focus on Undoing Its Root Causes.”
Rice is a fellow at the institute, a self-described “think tank and campus network that believes in an economy and democracy by the people, for the people” and a nonprofit partner of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, N.Y. She insists the problem must not be viewed as a zero-sum issue pitting whites against African Americans.
“Describing the problem as a racial wealth gap doesn’t help us clearly articulate a vision that is based on the values we hold most dear,” she writes. “We could simply narrow the black-white racial wealth gap if white families lost their wealth and became poorer without providing any gains to black families. This is not what we want for either community or our society more broadly. What we really want is liberation and dignity for all people; however, fixating on closing racial wealth gaps does not guarantee that we can deliver that.”
The study states: “Focusing on the root of racial wealth inequality rather than fixating on the racial wealth gap can help us build a path toward a fairer and more sustainable economic and political system — one that will right our historical wrongs and prevent such injustices from occurring in the future.”
Price rejects surface solutions, saying that “focusing exclusively on ‘closing the gap’ distracts us from reckoning with the systemic economic decisions that are actually driving racial wealth inequality and thus hinders us from addressing its root causes.” Instead, she urges reformers to concentrate on long-term, deep-seated issues such as corporate power, public goods, and democratization, as well as “the role that mass incarceration plays in preventing black families and black communities from building wealth.”
Price dismisses the notion that a free market solves all social ills and writes off calls for minorities to “pull yourselves up by the bootstraps” as “toxic individualism.” She cites University of Georgia Professor Mehrsa Baradaran in pointing out, “Black people have often been urged to engage in capitalism with no capital.”
“Working to close a racial wealth gap based on individualized solutions and greater financial coaching does not account for the systematic, historical advantage that white Americans received, and continue to benefit from, through American economic policies over generations,” Price states.
Price writes of land theft from the mortgage crisis of the Great Recession — which hollowed out minority communities in Chicago and elsewhere — going back to Jim Crow segregation and even Reconstruction. (How many families of former slaves are still waiting for the “40 acres and a mule” they were promised?) She falls back at times on the argument for reparations advanced by Ta-Nehisi Coates and his charge that “so large was this plunder that America, as we know it today, is simply unimaginable without it.”
“Not only do we fail to acknowledge that we built an economy on the backs of black labor, but that we also created systems, rules, and policies that actively and intentionally harm black people,” Price writes.
She repeatedly returns to the point that many of the racial disparities that produced the wealth gap were based on government policies, such as “massive tax cuts to the rich, deregulation, financialization, the dismantling of our nation’s social safety net, and (shifting) the bargaining power of workers by pushing out organized labor, the most effective force in fighting for middle- and working-class wages. All of these efforts are driving wealth inequality.”
She points out that voter suppression today is helping to sustain those misguided policies, but of course that too is nothing new going back to the Jim Crow era and Reconstruction.
With free-market capitalism calling the political shots, especially in the Trump administration but going back to President Reagan and beyond, Price bemoans the general “corruption and erosion of government power” when it comes to enforcing basic rules of fair and equitable treatment under the law.
Obviously, attacking these entrenched laissez-faire government positions would benefit all races when it comes to income inequality, but Price also urges giving priority to what she calls “centering blackness,” stating: “The real-life needs of black people have been historically overlooked and undervalued in the creation of economic policies. There is a growing recognition that structural racism generates unequal life outcomes for black people, which in turn shapes economic policies that negatively impact everyone else, including white people. Yet, there is still a great deal of reluctance, even among the progressive-minded, to consider the black experience as the foundation of our economic policies and to embark on a serious and sustained effort to center blackness as a necessary condition of economic freedom and dignity for all Americans.
“We absolutely cannot proclaim to be solving for racial wealth inequities while at the same time repackaging lists of familiar ideas that are built on austerity, personal responsibility, and toxic individualism,” Price concludes. “Ultimately, a new racial-wealth framework — one that centers on the root of racial wealth inequality rather than fixating on the gap — will create a broader opportunity to tackle the structure of our economy while also taking a hard and honest look at what freedom and dignity mean today and what they could mean for all of us, especially black people.”