It’s likely that you had very little to do with your inheritance—big or small—but the wealth gap that we see across groups is an outcome of historical, structural racism and racial terrorism. The wealth gap was fueled, in part, by the 1618 Headright System (which gave fifty acres of land in the “new colonies” to any European willing to travel across the Atlantic); exacerbated by the enactment of the Slave Codes in 1705 (which allowed whites to enslave and own Blacks, but not vice versa); ramped up by the 1785 Land Ordinance Act (which divvied up the ancestral lands of Indigenous Americans); deepened by the 1862 Homestead Act (which provided free land for citizens—note that Blacks were not eligible for citizenship until 1868); cemented by racially inequitable implementation of the 1944 Serviceman’s Readjustment Act (better known as the GI Bill); intensified by redlining policies encouraged by the Federal Housing Administration through 1968; and further worsened by the Great Recession of 2008. The wealth gap is rooted in many hundreds of years and thousands of policies that might be best characterized as affirmative action for white people.62
The thing about wealth is that it helps when you need help most. Individuals and families with more wealth can more easily maneuver about the world than those without it can. If you need an attorney (after one of those “unlucky” police stops), you can rely on wealth. If you want to help your child pay for college or help him or her buy a new home, you can rely on wealth. If you want to run for public office, you can rely on wealth. You can attain more stuff with wealth: education, property, power, and more wealth. These disparities make Blacks vulnerable to the negative outcomes of economic shocks (like the Great Recession) and make the fall harder to bounce back from when they are knocked down by the loss of a job or a sudden decline in health.
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Health
Basic indicators of quality of life measure how healthy people feel and how long they are expected to live. According to epidemiological research, Black people live shorter lives than whites do. Also shocking is the fact that the Black-white mortality gap did not close for the forty years between 1960 and 2000. Researchers project that if this gap had closed, nearly eighty-four thousand Black deaths per year could have been prevented.63 Obviously, how healthy a person is has a lot to do with individual behavior (e.g., eating well, exercise), but there is so much more to it than that. To begin, “public health research increasingly recognizes that racial/ethnic disparities in health are rooted in social factors such as SES [socioeconomic status], discrimination, and residential segregation,”64 things we have already discussed.
Again, where you live can have a tremendous influence on your life. Blacks are highly segregated, and Latinxs increasingly so, and thus are isolated from “high-opportunity neighborhoods,” or neighborhoods marked by “sustainable employment, high-performing schools, healthy environments, access to high-quality health care, adequate transportation, high-quality child care, neighborhood safety, and institutions that facilitate civic engagement.”65 To a large extent, Blacks are excluded from the geography of opportunity, and their health outcomes are dampened as a consequence. Food deserts, or places where high-quality, affordable food is not easily accessible, are likely to form in low-income and Black neighborhoods.66 When hospitals close, they are more likely to do so in low-income and Black neighborhoods.67 When family-planning clinics are eliminated by state policies, Black and Latina women are the most negatively affected, as their access to reproductive health care services is substantially decreased.68 If you thought we were being merely metaphorical by talking about the “geography of opportunity,” guess again. Your zip code, as structural inequality would have it, is a helpful predictor of your life expectancy, such that five miles can make a twenty-year difference.69 That’s right, your zip code is a better predictor of your health than your genetic code is.
One thing that stands out to us is that even when Black people attain more education, there is not necessarily an increase in well-being (recall, for example, that even with more education, Blacks still fall behind in levels of wealth, and they pay even more for their homes). In the case of infant outcomes, research shows not only that Black babies are two to three times more likely to die than are white babies in their first year of life but also that even as Black women step into the middle class, infant-mortality rates do not decline. In fact, there is a larger disparity between Black and white women at the higher end of the socioeconomic spectrum than at the lower end. One emerging theory is that middle-class Black women have to contend with chronic stress, including stress that results from exposure to racial discrimination.70 Black lives are literally more likely to be lost.
As mentioned, all of these domains of life we’ve discussed so far are interrelated. “Educational attainment and income provide psychosocial and material resources that protect against exposure to health risks in early and adult life”; meanwhile, “persons with low levels of education and income generally experience increased rates of mortality, morbidity, and risk-taking behaviors and decreased access to and quality of health care.”71 As we know, Blacks are less likely to have access to quality education and are shut out of job opportunities more so than whites. Keeping that in mind, it’s important to note, “unemployed persons tend to have higher annual illness rates, lack health insurance and access to health care, and have an increased risk for death. Several studies indicate that employment status influences a person’s health; however, poor health also affects a person’s ability to obtain and retain employment.”72 Rinse. Repeat. The cycle continues.
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When Black Lives Matter
James Baldwin wrote in a letter to Angela Davis, who was two decades his junior and imprisoned on false charges of murder, kidnapping, and criminal conspiracy,
The enormous revolution in Black consciousness which has occurred in your generation, my dear sister, means the beginning or the end of America. Some of us, white and Black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name. If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.73
What’s past is prologue, they say. Today, young Black people have again taken the United States to task, forcing it to face its greatest flaws, many of which are rooted in anti-Black racism. One of these problems is that many Americans have yet to come to the realization that though most of us value rugged individualism, this country thrives because it is upheld by the threads that weave together many interrelated—though segregated—communities. If we don’t solve the problems that one community is facing, all Americans and the United States itself will suffer. If we do not protect the most vulnerable, we can be assured that we will find ourselves in that same undesirable position soon enough.
We see this dynamic playing out right now. For example, the War on Drugs served to punish people not only for the sale of drugs but also for drug use and addiction. When drugs such as crack cocaine ran rampant in highly segregated, poor, Black neighborhoods, African Americans bore the brunt of these policies, best evinced by the disproportionate number of Blacks who are incarcerated in the United States. As work disappeared from urban areas, Black unemployment rates skyrocketed, and all of the problems associated with highly unemployed areas developed: increased pessimism, drug use, homelessness, and crime. Behaviors that are stereotypically associated with poor Black people are neither unique to that group nor pathological. Instead, they are well predicted by structural factors, including the shape of the economy and the way that policy makers react to those who are most in need. Suffice it to say, policy makers tend to react negatively and with punitive policies to groups they see as undeserving.74
As a result of the Great Recession, many of these issues peaked again: unemployment,