08-08-2007, 01:39 AM
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#16 (permalink)
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Mercenary
Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 293
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Quote:
"It will take many decades, at the rate we're going, to make any substantial progress toward closing the wealth gap."
Wealth Gap Widens For Blacks, Hispanics (washingtonpost.com)
One major reason that gap has proven so intractable, economists and historians say, is that wealth begets wealth...
Homes that appreciate in value give families growing equity that can be used to secure loans to send their children to college, cover emergency costs and provide a source of wealth that can be tapped in retirement or passed on to the next generation.
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It must be noted that:
by 2052, an estimated $40.6 trillion will change hands as Baby Boomers and their parents pass on their accumulated assets to their heirs.
Baby Boomer Wealth Transfer
Once again, Baby Boomers were born between 1946 and 1964 - right in the heart of America's Segregation Era.
Quote:
How does geography do the work of Jim Crow laws?
In the 1940s and 1950s the whole country was living in central cities or in rural areas. Suburbs as we know them hadn't come into existence. There was a tremendous demand for housing at the end of World War II, and the federal government stepped into the breach, and stepped into the role of addressing the demand for housing, as it also stepped into the role of addressing the demand for civil rights and inclusion by blacks.
In creating the suburbs it was explicit that the suburbs were for whites only...
The structure of that is still what we're living with today...
What were the consequences of this new housing policy?
One of the consequences of creating these new home ownerships for millions of white Americans while redlining black America was to create wealth in a racialized way...
So whites moving to the suburb were being subsidized in an accumulation of wealth, while blacks were being divested. As a result, there's a huge wealth differential between blacks and whites in this country that's largely associated with housing. The majority of Americans have their wealth in housing, and because the housing stock was so incredibly racialized, it created tremendous wealth in the white population and very little wealth in the black population.
RACE - The Power of an Illusion . Background Readings | PBS
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Last edited by Xibit; 08-08-2007 at 08:18 AM.
Reason: edit
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