Читать книгу Stay Woke - Candis Watts Smith - Страница 15

Income is the money that you bring in from your job. It is typically the case that as people get promoted within an organization, their income also increases. As we see more people of color in management, seated at the table of executive boards, and in administrative positions in institutions of higher education, many of us conclude that nonwhites must be doing better financially. Unfortunately, there is still plenty of wage inequality across racial groups. For instance, Pew Research shows that in 1980, Black men’s median hourly wages accounted for about 83 percent of white men’s hourly wages, and in 2015, Black men’s median hourly wages accounted for about 83 percent of white men’s hourly wages. The income gap between Black and white men has not changed in three and a half decades!55 When you add gender to the mix, researchers show that, with the exception of Asian men, all groups lag behind white men in terms of median hourly earnings.56

Some of this difference comes from the fact that Blacks and Latinxs do not attend college at the same rates as whites, but what happens when we account for these important differences? Researchers from the Economic Policy Institute reveal that in 2015, “relative to the average hourly wages of white men with the same education, experience, metro status, and region of residence, black men make 22.0 percent less, and black women make 34.2 percent less.”57 This gap appears to increase as we move up the education ladder. Similarly, the New York Times’ editorial board explained, “Last year [2016], black college graduates earned about 21 percent less per hour on average than white college graduates; in 1979, the gap was 13 percent. The racial disparity in earnings is even greater for men: Last year, the average hourly earnings of black college-educated men were about 25 percent less than of white college-educated men. The gaps widen up the economic ladder. The top 5 percent of black male earners make about 47 percent less than the top-earning white men.”58 That’s a hard pill to swallow if you’ve been under the impression that education is the great equalizer. The thing is, income is actually a very superficial measure of financial well-being. Income pays your bills, but wealth is what you have left after all of your bills are paid. Examining wealth disparities is important because it reveals how being poor and Black is quite distinct from being poor and white. It also reveals that those high-income Black folks in management may be one or two pay checks from poverty. Even low-income white people have more wealth and more cushion to fall back on in really hard times than do well-paid and well-educated Black people, on average.

Family wealth, by race and education. (Hamilton et al., Umbrellas Don’t Make It Rain, 5)

Median family wealth by race. (Hamilton et al., Umbrellas Don’t Make It Rain, 4)

Currently, the median Black family’s wealth is about $7,113, compared to $117,740 for the median white family. Here’s the rub: it is generally difficult to attain wealth, and it is even more difficult for Black people. Blacks with an advanced degree have about $84,000 in wealth. Whites with the same level of education have about three and a half times that wealth, and whites who do not even have a college degree tend to have about $2,200 more in wealth. Black Americans with a college degree only have about 67 percent of the wealth that whites who never graduated from high school have.

Maybe all those Black people with doctoral degrees should just try to make more money? That doesn’t do the trick. Blacks with high incomes ($93,000+) have lower levels of wealth than do whites making between $57,000 and $93,000. All in all, research shows that “racial wealth differences cannot be explained by education, employment, or income.”59 Experts have calculated that Black households would have to save 100 percent of their income for three years to close the wealth gap!60 And still, it is predicted that in 2053, the median wealth among Blacks will be $0.00.

How does this all work? Much of the wealth people have comes from their homes, but another source is one’s family, especially one’s parents and grandparents: wealth is often intergenerationally passed down.61 Let’s say your grandparents got a loan for a home in one of those Green neighborhoods we discussed earlier, and they passed it down to your parents. Your parents now live in a home with little or no payments, and their home is building equity (a house’s value minus what is owed on it). When you go to college, they can borrow from the equity so that you do not have to take out loans. You’re better off already.

Now let’s imagine that they pass the house to you, but you have a low-paying job. You’re still doing okay because you just have to pay utilities, upkeep, and taxes. Your kids can still go to the “good,” well-resourced schools even though you make little money. This scenario looks much different for a person who is the descendant of people who bought a home in the Red neighborhood. There is no wealth on which to fall back on for college, and if you do live in that home, your children may go to a school that is underresourced. In all, we have to remember that some people were legally (and sometimes violently) excluded from amassing wealth through home ownership—the path that many white Americans have taken to weave a tightly knit social safety net for their families.

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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