*A report on the racial wealth gap released by the Institute for Policy Studies last month found it will take Black households a whopping 513 years to reach income parity with white households, despite significant socioeconomic advancements since the Civil Rights Movement.
The website Tag24 notes that at the time of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s pivotal “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, Black Americans had a 51% poverty rate compared to 15% for white Americans. Nearly six decades years later, one in five Black Americans (20%) lived in poverty in 2021, compared to one in 12 white Americans (8%).
High school attainment among Black Americans has increased from 24.8% in 1962 to 90.1% in 2022, but Black college attainment remains behind at just 27.6% compared to white college attainment at 37.9%. Unemployment rates have also dropped significantly over the years, coming in at 5% and 6% since 2018 and before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Despite the advances, the report found it will take Black Americans centuries to catch up with white Americans, unless immediate action is taken to reduce the racial wealth gap, which researchers have calculated to total at least $14 trillion.
Some of the proposed solutions to narrow America’s economic divide include instituting a federal jobs guarantee, expanding access to land and homeownership, raising taxes for the super-wealthy, and universal health care in the form of Medicare For All.
Another important piece of the puzzle is a strong reparations program for Black Americans to address the lingering effects of enslavement, Jim Crow, and current structural racism. The report’s authors note that such a program could be financed by raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans and closing tax loopholes, rather than increasing the burden on everyday taxpayers.
While reparations efforts at the city and state level hold promise, the study concluded that federal action will also be necessary to attack the racial wealth disparity.
READ MORE ON EURWEB: https://eurweb.com/2023/heres-how-several-states-are-handling-reparations/
