Racial Income Inequality Flashcards
CARD #1: African Americans built America’s wealth 246 years//They did this by being slaves and working centuries for free.// By 1863, American slaves were worth $3 Billion. That is $83 Billion in 2018 dollars.// The median White household wealth (Assets minus Debt) is $171,000. The median Black household wealth is $17,600.! And that gap is still growing each day.//January 1865, the Civil War was ending. General Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton gathered 20 Black Leaders. They asked them what the black community needed to build lives in freedom?//Their leader, Rev. Garrison Frazier answered simply “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land.” // Four days after the meeting, Sherman issued Spedial Field Order No. 15. It set aside hundreds of thousands of acres of land, saying each family shall have a plot of not more than 40 acres of tillable ground.
The day before his second inauguration, Lincoln signed a bill that made the plan official. America was almost a very different country. But it didn’t turn out that way. Weeks later, Lincoln was shot and killed. His successor, Andrew Johnson, quickly reversed course. By the end of that year, thousands of African Americans that received land were evicted.
Slaves had been creating American wealth for 246 years. And that wealth, Whites got to keep.
Ensueing centuries have made the the disparity grow rapidly. Today, Black families make far less than Whites and Black houses are worth much less and appreciate much less that White neighborhoods.
CARD #2: KEEP THE BLACKS OUT OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD.
In a new neighborhood, having a Black family move in immediately lowered property values. If many blacks moved in, the white families would flee to new neighborhoods in the county without any Black families. If a Black family was looking for a house, the realitor would steer them away from the new White neighborhoods. Equal housing laws took effect in 1968, but still Blacks were manipulated and locked out.
Senator Cory Booker tells what happened to his family in 1969.
Cory Booker’s family to get their house even had white people to straw man buy the house, but on the house closing the real buyers, the Black Cory Booker family would show up to sign the papers and buy the house and they were accompanied by their lawyer.
“The real estate man was so angry, he stands up and punches my dad’s lawyer. Literally they are fighting, scrambling, and there was a dog in the corner, and he sicced the dog on my father!”
“So my father is now trying to fight off a big dog, a window was smashed, but eventually things settled and the real estate agent was desperate, and started begging my father: “You dont wanna move here, your people are not here.”
He was so afraid that one black family would move in and somehow it would destroy his businness and drive down real estate rates.
CARD #3: THEY GET THE HOUSE.
Well they did get the house, and the house built lots of wealth for the black family. So much that Cory got a good education and became an United States Senator!
His father rolled into another house in the same town, and got an even bigger house. They went from poverty to being very comfortable middle class.
In the 90’s, Clinton era, the government made a push to open up the mortgage market. Black house ownership started ticking upward.
It looked as if the wealth gap might start closing at long last.
Instead, Black families were twice as likely to get sub-prime loans than white families.
The sup-prime loan starts out cheap, and get much more expensive the longer it exists.
A prime loan is typically 20% down payment. A sub-prime is zero down.
Banks like Wells Fargo would go to Black churches and make a donation for every Black that buys a new mortgage loan. They didn’t realize they were all sub-prime loans.
In 2008, we had the mortgage sup-prime meltdown. Thousands, perhaps millions of house loans that went into default because unqualified people bought all these new houses and they didn’t have the money to keep up with their loans.
CARD #3: THE COLLAPSE
Black communities lost 53% of their wealth overnight.
College graduates:
White college graduates, over two decades normally dramatically have boosted their wealth. Whereas Black college graduates that make the very same amount of money, two decades later normally have decreased their wealth.
The reason is that in the Black families, the Black college grad with a good paying job is the most successful person in all the history of that family, from their early roots to present day. This graduate is viewed as being very rich, and her family is dirt poor and struggling to survive. So the Black college graduate helps out a lot by spending most of her money to help her family get by.
The white college graduate doesn’t have this problem. She buys new cars and new houses. The houses appreciate in value and her wealth continues to sky rocket decade after decade, generation after generation. This brings us to present day with the huge wealth disparity between whites and blacks.[MN: This explains why they started affirmative action plans in the workplace.]The film ends comparing a Black man’s wealth trying to catch up with a White man’s wealth. They compared it to a foot race to wealth equality. With the Black man’s roots being a slave for 246 years, then add another 100 years of repression, makes it 346 years.
So the analogy is Black vs White in a foot race to wealth building, but the Black man has to start building 346 years after the white man started running in the race!
Good documentary.
