The Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity and the Insight Center for Community Economic Development put out a great report titled “What We Get Wrong About Closing the Racial Wealth Gap.”
You can read a short editorial summarizing a few of the findings here.
The report presents ten myths regarding the racial wealth gap and then gives the evidence again each of these myths:
- Myth 1: Greater educational attainment or more work effort on the part of blacks will close the racial wealth gap
- Myth 2: The racial homeownership gap is the “driver” of the racial wealth gap
- Myth 3: Buying and banking black will close the racial wealth gap
- Myth 4: Black people saving more will close the racial wealth gap
- Myth 5: Greater financial literacy will close the racial wealth gap
- Myth 6: Entrepreneurship will close the racial wealth gap
- Myth 7: Emulating successful minorities will close the racial wealth gap
- Myth 8: Improved “soft skills” and “personal responsibility” will close the racial wealth gap
- Myth 9: The growing numbers of black celebrities prove the racial wealth gap is closing
- Myth 10: Black family disorganization is a cause of the racial wealth gap
Pertinent both to our discussions on theft of black wealth and the conversation about reparations in Seeing White, the authors in this report give a detailed argument about why behavioral interventions to close the racial wealth gap are doomed to fail.
“We challenge the conventional set of claims that are made about the racial wealth gap in the United States. We contend that the cause of the gap must be found in the structural characteristics of the American economy, heavily infused at every point with both an inheritance of racism and the ongoing authority of white supremacy.
“As a result, blacks cannot close the racial wealth gap by changing their individual behavior –i.e. by assuming more “personal responsibility” or acquiring the portfolio management insights associated with “financially literacy” – if the structural sources of racial inequality remain unchanged. There are no actions that black Americans can take unilaterally that will have much of an effect on reducing the racial wealth gap. For the gap to be closed, America must undergo a vast social transformation produced by the adoption of bold national policies, policies that will forge a way forward by addressing, finally, the long-standing consequences of slavery, the Jim Crow years that followed, and ongoing racism and discrimination that exist in our society today.”
Questions to consider
- How many of these myths are only plausible due to racist prejudice against black people?
- Why are explanations of inequality that “blame the victim” more appealing than explanations that place some burden of responsibility on me? How can I counter-act this bias?
Toward Health 