Plundering Black America
An excerpt from an important new book chronicling the history of the racial wealth gap
We’ve been confronted in recent years with a ridiculous amount of lies that there is no such thing as structural or systemic racism in America. This fallacious flood of misinformation has helped fuel the hostile attacks on the study of racial history and the virulent rejection of diversity, equity and inclusion by the white nationalist Trump regime.
My friend and former colleague Calvin Schermerhorn, a historian of slavery in the United States, addresses the factual reality in his new book, The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made. By telling the stories of seven families over 400 years, he shows how the fruits of their labor were stolen again and again, from generation to generation, saddling Black families with a deeply inequitable struggle to advance economically.
Calvin’s powerful book is full of insights—and I hope you’ll consider getting a copy and reading it. What follows is a short excerpt, in which he describes the scale of the racial wealth gap in America, how it happens, and the reasons why it remains a terrible burden for everyone who cares about equality and justice.
Wealth’s absence in Black America has a long history. By one recent measure, for every dollar that a median white American household has, an African American one has only sixteen cents.
African Americans did not lose or squander wealth on the ongoing road from enslavement to equality. Black people did not invest unwisely or fritter away the fruits of their labor. Instead, each time the American economy changed, the agents of that change have dispossessed, disinherited, or decapitalized African Americans.
Frederick Douglass called this process “plunder.” Douglass saw the United States as a nation whose citizens cooperated in robbing him of his liberty and the reward of his labor. That history did not begin with the kind of enslavement Douglass experienced in the nineteenth century. It began long before, and it didn’t cease when slavery ended. The wealth stripped from Black people like Douglass became white family assets passed down as inheritance. The effects of that plunder have also been passed down to African American families.
Each time Black Americans gained a little wealth, new policies or economic practices stripped them of that wealth and imposed new barriers to its creation and retention. That process unfolded in stages, peeling away assets in the present and obstructing opportunities for helping the next generation. Americans may believe that wealth is a product of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps and striving, diligence, resilience, or good fortune. But there’s more to it than individual effort. Household wealth is founded on the strivings and savings of previous generations who passed on to children resources that include inheritance, education, stability, and wisdom, among other potential income-generating tools.
The accepted narrative of United States history has been of a long march to freedom, the cadence of which slowed with the growth of slavery and quickened at Emancipation. It faltered the era of Jim Crow and found its footing again during the Civil Rights era. Over the last forty years, the march got mired again and civil rights moved backward. Yet the stripping of Black income and wealth has persisted even in those times of revolutionary steps forward. It has been so relentless that the stripping of Black wealth has come to resemble an algorithm, intelligence, or rule set governing American economic development.
The year Americans elected the first Black president was when Black households lost 48 percent of their wealth in the 2008 housing crisis. In the new century, artificial intelligence replicates Black disadvantage in credit scoring, leading effectively to surcharges on blackness. African Americans pay more for vehicles and carry more costly debt for home loans, credit card borrowing, and education debt than whites. Most African Americans report having no credit or subprime credit, and Black families pay proportionally more income for homes and college. The covid-19 pandemic and restrictions on women’s reproductive care in the form of abortion bans have intensified health disparities.
Decapitalization shows no signs of attenuating. More than 160 years after Emancipation, Black Americans own just 3 percent of national wealth despite constituting 13.4 percent of the population, while whites own 84 percent of national wealth despite representing only 60 percent of the population. Four percent of Black households have over $1 million in net worth, but a quarter of white households do.
And that racial wealth gap has been stubbornly wide over the last four decades: whites have collectively greater upward mobility, and Black Americans have higher rates of downward mobility. Today the typical African American family has about one-sixth the wealth of the typical white family. Some 3.5 million Black families have zero or negative wealth, or fewer liquid assets than might be found in a lost wallet.
The first Trump term made clear that the plan was to continue undermining economic progress for Black America in myriad ways. Trump elevated judges opposed to civil rights, women’s reproductive rights, health equity, environmental justice, and affirmative action. His administration reversed rules meant to make school lunches more nutritious and tried to restrict the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for Americans struggling with hunger. The Trump administration reversed environmental and antidiscrimination rules and removed roadblocks to residential resegregation and rules for banks to lend to low-income borrowers.
The Trump administration also cut Pell Grants to low-income students, and the Trump-backed 2017 tax cuts continued the Reagan Bush-era practice of financing widening inequality at public expense, since benefits went to top earners and corporations and there was negligible trickle-down effect. In short, the administration cut or tried to ax proven ways of boosting working families into the middle class across the board.
Trump’s leadership and party touted economic populism clothed in the old garb of white nationalism while championing policies that promoted wealth inequality. Rochell [who’s that?] called it a “suppression of truth and fact” and a cynical “return on narrative” to stoke white grievance fantasies targeting Black people.
In short: Wealth—the endgame of income— has widened into a chasm of inequality. “Every dollar has a history,” a prominent historian declares—a story of how someone made it, saved it, invested it, or squandered it. Theft of wealth has a history, too.
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“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” – Elie Wiesel
Eugenics weren’t first used on the Jews, by the Nazis. The American eugenics movement, active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, promoted selective breeding and sterilization to “improve” the population. Some proponents advocated or tolerated public health neglect to eliminate “undesirable” groups.
The broader eugenics movement in the U.S. was driven by figures such as Charles Davenport and organizations like the Eugenics Record Office (ERO). It was funded by influential philanthropies, including the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Harriman family, which supported sterilization laws and racial hygiene programs that later influenced Nazi policies.