President Biden traveled to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to mark the 100th anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, one of the single greatest acts of racist terrorism in U.S. history. Over a span of 18 hours, a white mob burned down what was known as “Black Wall Street,” the thriving Black neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa, and killed an estimated 300 African Americans. Duke University professor William Darity says it’s “very impressive” that a sitting U.S. president highlighted the Tulsa race massacre and its lingering effects, but he says he’s skeptical that Biden’s economic proposals do enough to close the racial wealth gap. “We need something much more potent and much more substantial,” Darity says. “If we were going to bring the share of Black wealth into consistency with the share of the Black population, it would require an expenditure of at least $11 trillion.”
let me start by saying that we need to be aware of how large the gap is in wealth between Blacks and whites in the United States. The average Black household has a net worth that is $840,000 less than the average white household. A corresponding fact that’s associated with this condition is the Black population of the United States that is descended from persons who were enslaved here is about 12% of the nation’s overall population, but that’s a community that possesses less than 2% of the nation’s wealth. And so, if we were going to bring the share of Black wealth into consistency with the share of the Black population, it would require an expenditure of at least $11 trillion. And so, as a consequence, when we think about any set of policies or any individual policy that is alleged to close the racial wealth gap, we’ve got to ask whether or not it’s going to bring us any way close towards eliminating an $11 trillion deficit. And I’d like to argue that what the president proposed yesterday will do very little in terms of getting us there.
Let me talk specifically about the homeownership emphasis of the policies that he proposed. And I certainly am highly enthusiastic about the idea of eliminating discrimination in home appraisals, but homeownership in and of itself is not something that can be augmented sufficiently to erase the racial wealth difference. I think we have a tendency to overestimate the significance of homeownership alone as a component of an individual’s total array of assets. If we look at the
— source democracynow.org | Jun 02, 2021