Racial violence history explains today’s 25-cents-per-dollar black-white wealth gap

Evidence

In the same way, stories of racial violence spanning 150 years of American history reveal that many black Americans have been prevented from building generational wealth, and they shed light on our current racial wealth gap. According to the Federal Reserve of St. Louis, for every dollar of wealth that white families possessed in 2022, black families held only twenty-five cents. What’s more, the fact that black Americans had to abandon homes they owned for fear of losing their lives provides context for the black-white homeownership gap. It also helps explain the dearth of black-owned businesses. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 434

Categorization

• XREF: The 25-cents figure is the headline number of the whole reparations case, and the home-abandonment claim ties 150 years of violence to the present wealth gap — the crux of the ‘accounting’ argument.