Megabrands aren’t just uninterested in reducing our economy’s racial inequalities. They are enthusiastic advocates of policies that increase those inequalities. EricLevitz writes
Just stop increasing the racial wealth gap. Photo: Alba Vigaray/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock At some indiscernible point in the recent past, uptight, lily-white corporate America left its segregated suburb for a liberal arts college, made one Black friend, read exactly five pages of The New Jim Crow, and returned wrapped in kente cloth.
America owes its Black residents a large and growing debt. For most of U.S. history, the majority of African-Americans were effectively barred from accruing wealth. For centuries, the fruits of their forced labor were commandeered by southern slave masters and allied northern interests.
One way to do this to calculate the average wealth of each racial group. Under this accounting, using SCF data, the wealth gap isn’t $146,200 but $760,000. To be sure, we can make our society less racially unjust even if massive economic redistribution remains off the table. Straightforward anti-Black discrimination in housing and hiring remains prevalent in the U.S. We don’t need to become a social democracy to prosecute killer cops with greater frequency, or wait until the passage of reparations to reduce needlessly punitive and discriminatory criminal sentencing.
For example: If a rich banker’s son becomes a novelist, and then fathers a child who grows up to join the family business on Wall Street, this progression would register in the data as a testament to class fluidity. The novelist’s class privilege didn’t prevent him from earning far less than his parents, while his meager income didn’t prevent his daughter from ascending to the economy’s commanding heights.
Redistribution may be less of an inherent prerequisite for racial inequities in policing and incarceration. We can reduce sentence lengths and increase police accountability without reducing economic inequality. That said, in the present context, the overrepresentation of African-Americans in our prison population is inextricable from their overrepresentation among the poor.
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