Is the "Wealth Gap" the "Race Gap"?
Perhaps..... can we call this the "Racial Wealth Gap"?
When I think of income inequality, it's the millionaires vs. all else, Donald Trump vs. all else, the venture capitalists of Silicon Valley vs. the people getting priced out of Silicon Valley. But then there's a race factor. Though there are white people who are being forced to move out of the Valley, by and large most of those leaving are black and Latino.
In the 50s, minorities got left behind in urban places, considered "ghettos", while whites moved into a comfortable suburbia. Now gentrification is taking that process further by pricing blacks out of their own neighborhoods, usually because that area has gained popularity for whites for some reason or other (tech, in Silicon Valley's case).
I was thinking about this because of that documentary a while back that was looking at how discrimination of black people has been systematic even after civil rights were granted. One thing that stood out that I felt was a little harder to believe was the fact about net wealth, for blacks vs. whites. Net worth is usually used to measure prosperity because income alone is not enough: net worth measures the impact of assets and liabilities overall.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, 1 in 4 black families have a zero or negative net worth. Less than one in ten white families are in that same situation. For every $100 held by a white family, a black family hold $5.04. This is a pretty big gap. It's pretty big. It's definitely wider than I initially expected, and by far outweighs all other extremes of inequality that are geographic, gender-based, etc.
A large reason for this, from my perspective, is the lack of security that beleaguers minorities today. The cause for this is the historical discrimination we learned about in class, including the housing disparity I mentioned earlier. Many blacks and Latinos, though they may live in a wealthy area, are renting their homes, taking out loans, etc. That means that they are vulnerable to rising prices, as evidenced by many people who are being priced out of our area right now (look up Measure V!). Thus they don't earn from the massive asset that's housing, they have fewer savings, and are incredibly vulnerable to financial mishap. If there's an emergency in a black family, they are by far less equipped to handle it.
What all this evidence shows is that the race problem is a wealth problem, and that the wealth problem is also very much a race problem. Which means that we can't consider race without considering money, and we can't consider money without considering race.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianthompson1/2018/02/18/the-racial-wealth-gap-addressing-americas-most-pressing-epidemic/#1fc31a97a48a
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/racial-inequality-money-problems/479349/
This was a really good post that made me more interested in gentrifiicatin. I remember learning about gentrification in the San Francisco Mission District during HGAP and I wanted to research more into that again. The Mission Distict is heavily populated with Latino communities and has historically been subject to gentrification from growth and expansion of technology. For example, the cost of living and rent prices in the Mission District increased in the late 1990s after the Dot-com bubble boom. A lot of hiwte people moved to the mission district due oto the low cost of living and it's nearby location to Silicon Valley.
ReplyDeleteThis is incredibly interesting because I have always viewed income inequality and racial inequality as two separate issues. The institutionalized racism's effect on income inequality has been greatly expressed in the incarceration rates. African Americans and Latinos are disproportionately institutionalized and subsequently lose many of their rights. I think there is a positive feedback loop between racial inequality and income inequality. As there is more discrimination against African Americans they lose and increasing amount of their net worth.
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