Historical industry access shapes blacks’ preference for housing and insurance over stocks

Evidence

For example, it took until 1970 for the first black American to make a trade on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. In contrast, the real estate and insurance industries have a history of employing black real estate and insurance agents. Insurance, in particular, was a thriving field for black Americans: Historian Christy Ford Chapin describes how “during the early twentieth century, black-operated insurance firms experienced great success even as they competed vigorously alongside white-operated insurance companies for the business of African American consumers.” This history helps explain why, for more than a decade, black Americans earning more than $50,000 have consistently said they prefer to invest in housing and life insurance, according to a yearly survey by Ariel Capital Management and Schwab—even though these forms of investment are more conservative and bring lower returns than the stock market. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 458

Categorization

• QUESTION: The empirical claim that blacks prefer housing/insurance even at higher incomes — how does this interact with the tax-incentivized homeownership argument made elsewhere in the book?
• ADDENDUM: Directly feeds the earlier ‘Grafting & Growth’ thread only obliquely, but the homeownership-as-wealth mechanism ties into the housing preference finding.