by Bria Overs
From the racial wealth gap to the Black women’s pay gap, many terms have cropped up to describe the financial state of Black Americans. One word stands out: economic equality.
At the current rate of progress, Black Americans will reach economic equality more than 500 years from now. That’s according to “Still A Dream: Over 500 Years to Black Economic Equality,” a report issued this year for the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
An estimated 250,000 people came to the nation’s capital in August 1963, according to the National Park Service. (The NAACP puts the number closer to 260,000.) A partnership between the National Community Reinvestment Coalition and the Institute for Policy Studies spurred the report, which looks at the progress of Black Americans in the 60 years since the event.
Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, vice president of research and racial economic equality at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, is one of four report co-authors. He has over 20 years of experience researching and reporting on the racial wealth divide.
“I’ve been working with one of the co-authors, Chuck Collins, for almost 20 years and trying to help highlight that the dream at the end of King’s speech — the context — was economics and sociopolitical equality,” Asante-Muhammad tells Word In Black. “I think, too, in this post-George Floyd era, there have been many conversations around corporate and government commitments to racial equity. We wanted to note: ‘Well, how far have we come?’”
Bria Overs: What sparked the idea to create this report? I know it is tied to the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, but are there any other reasons why this report felt necessary at this particular time?
Dedrick Asante-Mohammad: As you know, it is the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, a time when the country generally likes to reflect on racial equity. But also, a lot of people haven’t focused on it as much, but this March on Washington was a march for jobs and freedom. So, it always had, at its base, an economic focus.
I think many people assume we’ve come remarkably far in terms of racial equity since the March on Washington, and there’s some truth to that. But when you look at the economics, you see a lot of spaces where there hasn’t been much progress. Though, this report does highlight where there has been economic progress.
BO: Speaking of economic progress, a term that’s popped up in recent years is economic equality or equity. The Federal Reserve calls it equity, and your report calls it equality. But what is this term really about? What is economic equality, and is it different from economic equity?
DAM: Often, equity is more about the process of making policy or some type of analysis that tries to be inclusive or address issues of racial economic equality. I think there’s space for both of these things.
I think people just use whatever they feel is the new, cool term. The racial wealth gap recently became a cool term.
I like to focus more on quantitative economic metrics because the foundation of racial inequality is racial economic inequality. And the foundation of racial economic inequality is the racial wealth divide.
BO: Delving deeper into the report, it compares and contrasts the socioeconomic realities for Black Americans in the 1960s and the decades after. Then, it fast-forwards to the last five to 10 years. Why is that comparison important to show? What was the goal of comparing these two different eras of time?
DAM: It’s important for people to recognize as we look back on the March on Washington, or the 60s, where the African American community was socioeconomically. Even though we highlight a lot of data that shows we haven’t made as much progress as most of us would like, it’s vital to know what progress has been made.
We noted in the report that in 1963, the Black poverty rate was 51%, and in the 1950s, it was even higher. The majority of Black people were in income poverty in 1963, and in just six years, by 1969, the war on poverty was implemented, and different programs were developed. The Black poverty rate had gone down to 32%. That’s a remarkable change.
Today, we have more than 20% of African Americans in poverty. It’s essential to recognize where we were in 1963, how rapidly that could be brought down, and how we’ve been somewhat stagnant over the last 20 years.
BO: The report also noted in bold that an analysis estimates it would take 780 years for Black wealth to reach that of non-Black wealth. That would be the closing of the racial wealth gap. What’s the math behind this number of years?
DAM: In 1962, African Americans had 12 cents for every dollar of wealth. By 2019, they had 18 cents for every dollar. Bridging that six cents of wealth took almost 60 years. If you keep doing that, it would take 780 years for African Americans to be able to bridge that wealth divide.
People say, ‘Oh, we’re not where we want to be in terms of racial equality, but we’re getting there.’ And the point of this analysis is we’re just not getting there. We are on no path toward bridging the Black-white wealth divide. If we want to close it, we have to do something very different. We can’t just do a little program here or there. We have to do something radically different if we really want to bridge the racial wealth divide in my lifetime.
It’s not that radically different for income — 780 years for wealth, we say 513 years for household income. I don’t think that’s necessarily in people’s minds that we’re also nowhere near the path to bridging income inequality, which is easier to change more immediately than even wealth.
BO: One of the solutions proposed is around a national and local reparation plan. We’ve seen an enormous push around reparations this year. Going into 2024, how likely are we to see progress on this next year or in the next few years? How do you feel about seeing a reparation plan come to fruition?
DAM: It depends on what you mean by a reparations plan. Some local governments and some corporations might do a program they call reparations. California had one the boldest, broadest ones, but California was focused on addressing one aspect of inequality, and that was homeownership. It wasn’t holistic.
For those of us who have been focused on reparations for a while, we’re talking about a large national reparations plan because we know only a large, long-term commitment from the federal government could actually bridge this racial economic inequality. So, I don’t see a likelihood.
I think we’ve gotten to the point where people can say the word, but we haven’t even proposed a holistic, national policy that would require a good amount of money. The Black-white wealth divide is around $10 trillion. So you’re going to need to invest a considerable amount to bridge this wealth divide if you want to bring African Americans up to where white people are.
