Shelterforce, February 8, 2022, Doing “The Right Thing” Won’t Close the Racial Wealth Gap
Our unwillingness to account for how wealth is and has been accumulated differently along racial lines and extracted specifically from Black people causes us to continue to promote individual solutions to a deeply structural problem. We are sold a fairy tale that if enough Black Americans “do all the right things”—get a college degree, buy a home, land a good job, or open a business—we can solve centuries-long racial wealth inequities.
Our government must reverse years of excluding Black Americans from wealth creation by enacting race-conscious interventions such as making massive investments in Black institutions and Black people, equalizing the tax code, providing reparations, working for the public good, and dismantling the prison industrial complex. Wealth should be seeded for Black families through young-adult trust accounts and income supplemented through targeted guaranteed-income programs. There is no shortage of solutions to create an economy that works for all and works for the very first time for Black Americans.
