The black-white wealth gap has been constant for half a century
remember Greenwood, a once-prosperous African-American neighbourhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that was known as Black Wall Street. In 1921 Dick Rowland, a black shoeshiner, was charged with attempting to rape a white lift-girl in a downtown office building. An incensed white mob gathered at the courthouse to lynch him, then proceeded to Greenwood for two days of rioting, looting and murder. City officials aided and abetted the violence.
Determining what lies behind the persistent wealth gap is essential to fixing it. The thinking ascendant on the left blames both present-day discrimination and the long history of racist public policies, such as redlining, an official practice that made it harder for blacks to get mortgages, and so permanently disrupted the transmission of wealth between generations.
If the cause of the persistent wealth gap is really a long-term income disparity, the policies needed to rectify it are different. Even as discrimination has declined and the country has instituted affirmative action programmes in university admissions and some job hiring, the black-white income gap remains high. A portion of this is due to present-day discrimination. There is strong evidence that employers are less likely to call back applicants with black-sounding names, for example.
A more promising proposal for narrowing the inheritance gap, offered by Darrick Hamilton and William Darity, two economists, is “baby bonds”—essentially trust accounts for every child born in America, which could not be accessed until adulthood. The federal government would top up these accounts each year, depositing more for poorer families. Cory Booker, a New Jersey senator running for president, has proposed legislation to do this.
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