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Rome-News Tribune: COVID-19 widens racial wealth gap, hitting Black businesses especially hard

Rome-News Tribune, June 22, 2020: COVID-19 widens racial wealth gap, hitting Black businesses especially hard

The federal supplemental unemployment benefits of $600, which expire at the end of July unless they are extended, can cover some of the gaps. But should those payments end, he said, people in service industries, who once often had to work two jobs to make ends meet, could still be vulnerable.

“More likely than not, you were using that extra job not just for extra cash but to pay regular bills,” Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, NCRC’s chief of Race, Wealth and Community, said.

“Even as people start going back to work, are people going to be making the same salaries as they were before?”

He fears that people of color will have a far more difficult time recovering from the 2020 recession, given the depth of the racial wealth divide.

“I do think that COVID highlighted racial inequality,” Asante-Muhammad said.

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