Nonprofit Quarterly, May 29, 2019: A plan to reverse “economic apartheid” in the US
Nearly 40 million Americans live in poverty, and it’s harder than ever to move into the middle class. And the racial dimensions to this growing divide were largely created by design.
“It’s not a gap that just happened by accident,” Dedrick Asante-Muhammad tells us. “It was an intentional policy-driven situation that maintains the racial divides we have in this country.”
Asante-Muhammad is a leader with the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a nonprofit challenging discriminatory practices in banking, housing, and business—sectors which he says have historically upheld policies that caused people of color to fall behind economically. After World War II, while whites benefitted from government policies that helped them enter the middle class, people of color were largely locked out.
