Reclaiming His Time

I am writing this blog on the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday. Intentionally. Leading up to the holiday, I’ve borne witness to the sanitization of Dr. King’s quotes, holiday sales advertisements, and multiple press statements filled with platitudes from organizations identified for “immediate release.” Today’s mainstream portrayal of Dr. King is two-dimensional, safe, and intended to make us feel good about or tolerate the lack of progress the United States has made toward true equality and justice for Black America. A few statistics:

According to the Urban Institute, racial and ethnic disparities persist:

• Families of color will soon make up a majority of the population, but most continue to fall behind whites in building wealth. In 1963, the average wealth of white families was $121,000 higher than the average wealth of nonwhite families. By 2016, the average wealth of white families ($919,000) was over $700,000 higher than the average wealth of black families ($140,000) and of Hispanic families ($192,000). Put another way, white family wealth was seven times greater than black family wealth and five times greater than Hispanic family wealth in 2016. Despite some fluctuations over the past five decades, this disparity is as high or higher than it was in 1963 [emphasis added].
• Blacks and Hispanics are less likely to own homes, so they more often miss out on this powerful wealth-building tool. Homeownership makes the most of automatic payments—homeowners must make mortgage payments every month—to build equity. In 1976, 68 percent of white families owned their home, compared with 44 percent of black families and 43 percent of Hispanic families. By 2016, the homeownership gap had narrowed slightly for Hispanics but widened for blacks. Black and Hispanic families were also less likely to own homes than white families with similar incomes [emphasis added].

According to the Brookings Institute, upward mobility is less likely for Black Americans: 

• On top of having less wealth than white Americans to begin with, Black Americans are both less likely to move up the economic ladder and more likely to slide down it. 
• Both Black and white Americans who have 10th or 25th percentile wealth in their early thirties are expected to improve their wealth position in their late fifties. However, Black Americans’ wealth status rises at a notably lower rate. For instance, Black Americans at the 10th percentile in their early thirties are expected to reach the 24th percentile in their late fifties — 13 percentiles lower than white Americans, who are expected to reach the 37th percentile.
• Black Americans who have high wealth are much more likely to lose ground than white Americans with the same wealth. For example, among those who start with wealth at the 90th percentile, Black Americans have much lower wealth in their late fifties (51st percentile) than white Americans (77th percentile). 
• We are far from closing the racial wealth gap. Our paper shows how the patterns of wealth accumulation and wealth mobility during working life contribute to this inequality. The racial wealth gap reflects different wealth dynamics as well as different starting positions. A white person with median wealth in their early thirties is expected to have more wealth in their late fifties than a Black person who has 90th percentile wealth in their thirties [emphasis added].

These statistics are outcomes of systems grounded in White Supremacy Culture working as intended– even to the detriment of the entire US economy– which Citigroup estimates racism cost the country as the whole 16 trillion dollars over twenty years. While racism, disenfranchisement, and anti-Blackness, are typically framed as just “Black-” or “BIPOC problems,” they harm us all.