TRANSCRIPTION
Maddie Braksick: You’re listening to “Voices in Equity,” the official podcast of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. On our first podcast series, we’re focusing on The Pandemic Divide: How COVID Increased Inequality in America. It’s a collaborative book from faculty – many here at Duke – who are committed to shining a light on inequities and truly making a difference.
I’m so excited for this episode for a couple of reasons. One, because it’s an interesting topic – financial insecurity, debt, and the pandemic. And two, because I get to take a backseat and let the amazing Dr. Darity lead the conversation today.
Dr. William Darity, known to most as Sandy, is the director here at the Cook Center and Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics at Duke. This episode features Fenaba Addo and Chris Wheat, who both contributed to chapters in section 3 of the Pandemic Divide:Covid-19 and financial disparities.
Fenaba Addo is an associate professor of public policy at UNC Chapel Hill, and Chris Wheat is the President of the JPMorgan Chase Institute.
Without further ado, Here’s Dr. Darity.
Dr. William “Sandy” Darrity: I guess I’d like to ask Fenaba about if she would begin the conversation by talking about some of the consequences of the pandemic for an area of indebtedness that has been a focus of her research, which is “Student Loan Debt”.
Fenaba Addo: So one of the things I’ll start off by saying is that, at the same time that we had the pandemic, we also had a presidential election happening, and student loan debt became a central issue of a lot of the Democratic nominee, candidates who are vying for the presidency. As a result, the discussions around student loans, student loans, in particular student debt cancellation became a hot button issue alongside the pandemic. And so when we saw the policy responses to the pandemic, we saw the President also include policies that address student loan debt. I hope I’m doing a good job of kind of explaining what I’m trying to say that there was these two ongoing events happening at the same time, that led to like this perfect storm of legislation and policy that also addressed student loan debt. And so I say that to say that we saw what ended up happening a moratorium on federal student loans. In particular, that went on to be extended an additional six times over the course of since 2020. And really thinking that we’ve been thinking a lot about how that impacted households, in particular black borrowers, who for whom we know some of the largest loan balances, and struggle the most with default and repayment. In addition to black households are bearing the brunt of a lot of the size of societal ills that came with the pandemic, such as higher unemployment in abilities to work bearing the brunt of the COVID pandemic. So having family or family members that got sick and potentially have had a higher probability of dying. So really thinking about how all of these forces kind of came together, the both the financial and the health in order to really impact these households.
Dr. William “Sandy” Darrity: Could you comment on why there’s a particular emphasis on student loan debt as opposed to other categories of indebtedness?
Fenaba Addo: So I’ll speak to why. Because for me, I think what we looked at explicitly racial wealth inequality. A lot of the racial wealth gap is driven by the asset side of the household balance sheet. But student debt is actually one of the liabilities or on the other side of the balance sheet, in which we do see stark race black white disparities. So as student debt kind of increased over the last 34 years, black households disproportionately took on a large share of that student debt. Now, this is coupled with what’s going on in higher education. So more students going to school changes in higher education, the shift from federal and state governments subsidizing education, so putting the risk on to families and households. So there’s a lot of reasons as to why not only my work is focused on student loan debt, but also why as a scholar of inequality, why we are particularly interested in how it’s operated in the lives of black households of black families.
Dr. William “Sandy” Darrity: In the context of what has happened with wealth inequality recently, we don’t actually have the standard, or gold standard national data set to rely upon for information about the black white wealth gap. The gold standard data set is the survey of consumer finances, which is produced by the Federal Reserve, and it’s generated on a three year basis. So the most recent survey that we have access to is the survey that was conducted in 2019. I think they’re in the process of collecting the data for 2022, but it will not be reported until fall 2023. We don’t actually have information from the Fed standard survey about what has happened to the racial wealth gap during the course of the pandemic. Now, I would like to point out that prior to the pandemic, the 2019 data indicates that the average black household has $841,900 less in net worth than the average white household. We do have some reasons for speculating that the wealth gap has expanded during the course of the pandemic. For example, within the first two months of the pandemic, the pandemic spreading in the United States, 40% of black owned businesses went out of operation. And so that would exhaust or eliminate a significant portion of the asset base that existed in the black community. So that’s a long winded up to asking, Chris Wheat, to talk about the dataset that they have at JPMorgan Chase, that might permit us to examine what has happened to wealth disparities between blacks and whites in the United States, or between any combination of ethnic and racial groups that are sufficiently covered in their data set since the pandemic took place. So, Chris, I’d like to turn to you.
Chris Wheat: Sure. And thank you, Sandy, for inviting me to talk about this and for inviting us, along with my colleagues that participates in the research and then the book. So we are super lucky to have access to data set comprised the identified data from Chase customers, the whole thing is actually from JPMorgan Chase from the universe. But the part that’s relevant, I think, to this conversation is this data set that we’re able to create from 10s of millions of customers to have checking, saving accounts and chase, sometimes we also look at credit card data, see households, we can see small businesses, and it just really gives us this very unprecedented view. Every day transactions and anatomy of accounts, balance levels on these accounts. I would agree with your assessment of the SCF in terms of like the kinds of things that it can measure very intentionally, in some sense, conceptually, what we aspire to, we want to understand payments and income and expenditures, and we have a pretty good lens on that, we want to understand the entirety of the balance sheet we are having, we’re seeing growth in our ability to understand that but even the piece that we see on day to day changes and checking account balances can help us understand some of those shorter term changes in the financial standing of households and small businesses. The data as it appears to us doesn’t really give us that lens on racial gaps. But we have been able to do work. And that’s part of I think, what got us into the conversation with you and your colleagues around racial gaps by finding ways to incorporate other data sources in some cases, think about the race, again, identify customers. So for instance, we were able to use voter registration data from Florida, Georgia and Louisiana, to get a self-reported land on about a million families in 10s of 1000s of small businesses that can help us understand through the course of the pandemic, I wouldn’t quite call it in real time. But we’re about a month out from what we’re seeing in our data and some time to think about it and, and write something up about it, but a much more up to date view on the subset of financial outcomes that we see broken out by race, conditional on the person being a customer. And for those race gaps being in a place where we can see something about the race of that customer, which of course isn’t the entire US. The data are still fairly representative, particularly for call at lower middle to upper middle income families where I think our populations have a pretty good view.
Dr. William “Sandy” Darrity: So could you tell us what you’ve learned about what has happened to the magnitude of the wealth disparity by race or ethnicity using the database that you have since the pandemic took place?
Chris Wheat: The interesting thing that I think we thought it might be over summarizing a bit here, but both looking at households and businesses was the large gaps that we saw, and then come or in women’s status, or in wealth, or at least wealth as we can see it really were the context that we had to use to understand what we saw through the pandemic. Like the very early turns that we saw in things like income imbalances. So by early here, literally the first month or so of the pandemic, there were places where we saw sharp returns downturns for Black, Hispanic and Latino families for instances, Asian business owners in some cases. In those very first weeks, in first months, we saw these really, really sharp pivots down as you got out farther into the pandemic, because of the idiosyncratic structure of some of the policies. And here I’m really speaking about the policies where there was policies that were like $6 amounts, or that maybe scale to the size of a family or something like that. They kind of landed on families that same, but they made a bigger relative difference for families that had less. And so a lot of the charts that we produced and like in the ways that we think about as compared to last year, or you can percentage points up or down, you actually see larger impacts for lower income families, or lower wealth families. Those happen to be the families that are often black or Hispanic or Latino. And so that was kind of an unexpected turn where we were seeing, 3, 4, 10, 15 months into the pandemic, like those relative changes in income and balance actually being higher for black and Hispanic and Latino and in general, low income family. But the really important piece of context of gap didn’t close, you mentioned an $840,000 average wealth gap from the 2019 SCF, if I’m remembering the number which may or may not be like the kind of movement that we were seeing is much, much smaller than that. But how it response, while significant in historic terms relative to federal policy. It’s still not there weren’t family that we’re receiving an excess of $840,000. So what that even these very, very significant programs are making large changes in surprise, we would understand in terms of the longer term structural differences.
Dr. William “Sandy” Darrity: So maybe this is a question I should have started with Fenaba, before jumping to student that. Could you talk a bit about what the difference is between income and wealth? And what the implications are for the federal policies that were designed to respond to the recessionary effects of the pandemic? Could you talk about the extent to which those policies might have influenced income versus influencing wealth?
Fenaba Addo: At a very basic level, I guess I’ll start off by saying when we think about wealth, the wealth equation. Wealth is the total value of one’s assets, that’s usually includes financial and non-financial assets, minus the total value of one’s liabilities or debts. So it’s as an equation. It is just what’s on one side of the balance sheet minus what’s the one owns versus minus one owes. And when we think about it as a form of social inequality lens, we know that wealth confers a whole lot more than just that equation. We tend to think of household wealth as a private safety net, like an insurance mechanism, when households experience shocks or unemployment, a health shock, you can turn to that stock of money in order to help buttress or weather, financial storms. This is in contrast to income, which is considered more of a flow. Most households a lot of lower to middle income households, that’s earned income through the labor market. But at the higher end of the income distribution, or I should say, in the higher end of the wealth distribution, a lot of that is like capital income from investments. So those are two very different the way we conceptualize it two very different ways of thinking about where people receive the economic resources into their households. So there’s a stack of that you can rely on the wealth and the income. So when we look at it through a racialized lens, the income gap between black or white households has been closing over time. To a certain extent, it’s smaller, but we look at the wealth gap, that’s the one that’s really exorbitant. It’s really large. And just like having this stock of private savings, this private safety net is lacking a lot and a lot of black households, across the income distribution. A lot of the policy that were passed during the pandemic were income means tested, or it means base tested. So they were relying on the earned income from household’s income based on the prior year. So the 2019 income that you reported to the IRS, for example, then looking at your wealth in order to kind of look at how much you may receive from like the Child Tax Credit, for example. So for many black houses, which was showing up in his data, please correct me if I’m wrong, Chris. But presumably, we see a lot of low income households who are disproportionately black and Latin’s, for example, receiving those tax credits based on their lower income profiles, and those were direct deposit allowing more direct deposited into bank accounts. So that’s really where we see these policies kind of policy responses, these findings of people’s income position, again lagged. So based on their previous years and come not really addressing the wealth positions of these households.
Dr. William “Sandy” Darrity: So is it fair to say that most of what was done in terms of the anti-pandemic stimulus packages, were income supplements as opposed to resources that were allocated for asset building purposes?
Fenaba Addo: That is correct, with the exception of so if you look at the, I’m gonna get it wrong because my mind is the business, the loans, the payroll protection. What you can’t ignore it, because that was meant to help a lot of small businesses. But as Sandy, you already alluded to earlier, that a lot of businesses, a lot of black owned businesses went out of business in those early months of the pandemic. So they weren’t able to receive the help from the federal government, if you couldn’t wait long enough to get the help from the federal government.
Dr. William “Sandy” Darrity: Is it also true unlike the income supplements that actually given their numbers, black owned businesses were less likely to receive the level of support from the payroll protection project that they should have received? I mean, isn’t there some evidence that there is discrimination in the distribution of the PPP funds?
Fenaba Addo: I believe there is some, as there are some studies that have been looking have looked at that and found some evidence to suggest that that may have been the case. There was a disproportionate number of, of larger businesses that were able to benefit from the program. Especially as like I said, the early months, there were several different iterations of the policy. But in those really early months, when probably the small businesses needed it the most, they were the ones that were not the recipients of the make a large share of those major payouts.
Chris Wheat: An important difference between there are many important difference, but one that I would specifically call out between PPP and some of the other programs, like the economic impact payments and modifications to US. The PPP loans were scaled to the revenues of the business. So explicitly household targeted programs. They weren’t means tested. But sort of conditional on being in the window of means things, the payments were not driven by, does your family spend a lot, they were driven by how big is your family. In contrast to the paycheck protection program if you were a bigger firm, you got more if you were a higher revenue firm, you have more employment expenses, you got a higher payment, as per the stated policy goal. I mean, if you need to be thought about that as a program intended to support small business employees, using small businesses as a channel, I got reasonable people could disagree about sort of whether or not that the policy structure, but it’s at least the logic of why you might do that. But it’s the case that Black Hispanic Latino businesses are generally smaller, they’re less likely to be important, businesses are less likely to have employees. And so when you look at it through a racial lens, you definitely see even conditional on getting payments or payments being smaller, because businesses themselves are smaller when you look at it in an aggregate level. A lot of dynamics going on in the PPP space and understand what’s happening.
Dr. William “Sandy” Darrity: Prior to the onset of the pandemic, I think only about 4% of black owned businesses had a second employee beyond the owner themselves. And if you were to take the entire space of black owned businesses, their total retail sales and this would be approximately 3 million firms. Their total retail sales did not amount to half of the total retail sales for Walmart alone. So you’re quite right. I mean, when we say that black owned businesses are small and scale, we could to actually say that they are relatively miniscule in scale. And if that is what determined the magnitude of funds received through the payroll protection plan, then obviously, black owned businesses would be at a severe disadvantage. But I want to ask him another question. I think that is related to the exchange we were having a moment ago and have a which is, is it entirely accurate to talk about the payroll protection plan as some sort of assets support mechanism for businesses, if the objective was to ensure that the businesses would continue to pay their employees, you could then view it as an indirect income supplement measure for wage earners who were employed by the businesses that received this?
Fenaba Addo: I was seeing it as both. I was seeing it as an asset, if we think of part of the wealth portfolio as business assets. So for the black owned businesses, that’s a source of their wealth. And indirectly, like you’ve pointed out, it is a source of income support for the employees and for people who are on their payroll. So I was looking at it more from the entrepreneur, or the self-employed standpoint as being a source of a capital asset for them.
Dr. William “Sandy” Darrity: But if we were to take the universe of black owned businesses prior to the pandemic, it would only be about 4% of them in principle that would have been eligible for PPP support?
Chris Wheat: If you were a non-employer business, you didn’t have to be an employer. I think that evolved through the rounds of PPP. Certainly, I think he got it in terms of like a logic, particularly right at the beginning was about supporting employees. I think 7% of businesses overall are employer businesses. So it’s a meaningful gap in the rate between black owned businesses and sort of white businesses, but just a level set. Like, most businesses counted in government statistics and non-employer businesses. But some of that did go to non-employer businesses, certainly in dollar terms, mostly went to employer businesses, because the dollar amount scaled up for larger businesses. So you kind of have to pick the statistic that answer the questions want to get at. But there’s definitely some nuance there. .
Fenaba Addo: And I’m also thinking about, if we think about the wealth distribution, and who’s at the higher ends, or the top quintiles, a lot of their. Wealth is in this from business assets, or gains from their businesses. So even if the black households that are at the top are not as wealthy as their white counterparts, if their source of their wealth is compromised, or was fragile in this moment, then we could potentially see once the new figures come out, if they weren’t able to benefit from these government policies.
Dr. William “Sandy” Darrity: Could each of you reflect a bit on the fragility point that, Fenaba, have just made? Is there a difference in the degree of precarity that’s faced by black owned businesses versus white owned businesses on average? If there is such a difference in the degree of precarity, what accounts for it?
Chris Wheat: I don’t know, because we haven’t done the research finding that. I don’t have any particular reason to think that the mechanisms are changed that much post COVID, although the context hear me out. But we definitely find through our lens and our data. So with all those caveats in aggregate, black owned businesses are more likely to go out of business at any given age, or some such, most of that seems to be explained by revenue, or like how big is the business through that lens and our lens on liquidity. Like how much of a cash balance do they typically keep it around? When you compare black owned businesses to white on businesses and to Hispanic Latino businesses for that matter, when they have in the same industry in the same place, same size, same amount of liquidity you really see those exit rates, even out quite a bit.
Fenaba Addo: Well, I’ll jump in there and say that, I think I agree with what, Chris, was saying about the fragility. I know, one of the things that I’ve looked at is differences in venture capital. So the amount of investment that a lot of these firms have to start off with which feeds into the amount of liquidity that, Chris, was referencing. I also have an interest in black women owned businesses. And we see that not only are they single employer owns a lot of the businesses that they have, but a lot of these women are also holding other jobs, while they’re also trying to have their own business. So they’re both in the labor market as an employee, but then also running their own business as well. And the inability to kind of focus solely either due to lack of financing, or primarily due to lack of financing, or enough to kind of venture out on one’s own in order to completely invest one’s time and money completely into their business. Mix it also extremely fragile. So we also see until I know a lot about this about the degree of inherited businesses. So it was as much more prevalent on among white owned businesses, and the different industries in which we see businesses kind of having access to and being able to flourish being a factor as well.
Dr. William “Sandy” Darrity: How do you situate the initial enormous difference in wealth between blacks and whites as a factor influencing the degree of fragility of white and black owned businesses?
Fenaba Addo: I think it’s a primary factor. I think whether or not a business starts off either in the red versus in the black, it’s a large determinant of our future success.
Dr. William “Sandy” Darrity: That’s one of the few contexts in which the term Black is used positively.
Fenaba Addo: That’s right. They don’t mind doing in the black for that one on the balance sheet. But there’s also, I should say, the caveat we have. We do see examples of wealthy or white business owners who have lots of debt and have lots of liabilities. And they use that and they turn that around in order to make more businesses and be quite lucrative and fruitful, but not seeing that same kind of mechanisms being offered or working in the same way for black businesses black.
Dr. William “Sandy” Darrity: Some people refer to that the distinction that you’re making here between having good debt and bad debt, could you comment on that of it?
Fenaba Addo: Just that the way that you’re able to use debt in order to make more wealth versus debt that is used against you? And as penalize, it seems like in the work that I do is student loans. Is it seen as an investment? Or is it seen as a moral failing that you’ve made bad decisions around taking on so much debt, rather than seeing it as something that was a smart decision that led you to pursue education, and so on and so forth? So, I believe that’s what you’re alluding to with this idea of good or bad, but also how it can be racialized in the sense. But who is holding it, when you call it good versus bad debt.
Dr. William “Sandy” Darrity: I mean, we have instances where people who hold extraordinary amounts of debt may actually have a negative net worth. But they are not going to be legitimately viewed as being wealth poor, because the type of debt that they’re holding, creates opportunities for them to build assets. And then you’ve got peculiar cases, like one of our former president, who I think frequently had a negative net worth. But I don’t think anybody would describe him as being wealth for. But that’s the extreme end of the distribution, when we start talking about most people who have a significant amount of wealth, we’re talking about people who have a large positive net worth. And that’s racially differentiated, because as from the work that we’ve done together, about a quarter of white households have a net worth, that’s an excess of $1 million. And that’s true for only 4% of black households, at least in the most recent data that we’ve had a chance to look at.
Chris Wheat: There’s an open finance textbook. It’s going to suggest that, getting a loan can be a really good way to finance and then an asset acquisition of some sort. And if you think it’s a bit of acid, it’s going to be all well and good. And so I think there’s a math answer to the question. And then there’s like a moral frame answer to the question. And it’s observable that that’s not equally applied to different kinds of people.
Dr. William “Sandy” Darrity: Some people are permitted to accumulate much larger amounts of debt than others.
Chris Wheat: And then the narrative about it is, this is a business loan and it’s a real estate financing, or whatever the case may be, it’s a totally well understood way of acquiring an asset versus for whatever reason that loans not being applied to, for instance, a student debt intended to build an educational asset and to support a career.
Dr. William “Sandy” Darrity: I mean, the corresponding line that I recall from my youth was the observation that the huge borrower from a lender actually owns the lenders operation. But love to hear any other observations, either one of you would like to make about this set of issues.
Chris Wheat: And I’ll keep it relatively brief. I alluded to it before. I mean, I know because I was one of the people doing it, at the beginning of the pandemic, my presupposition, and I think lots of people’s presupposition Was that pretty much whatever way you cut any analysis, be it about financial outcomes, non-financial outcomes, health outcomes, the chips are gonna fall the way that they typically do. So we’re all doing social science research for a while. And the accumulation of advantage usually plays out as a way of understanding what’s going to happen in response to any shock. And this is obviously a huge shock. And so my prior was that the outcomes were going to be uniformly worse for poor people, for people of color, and their intersections than on intersections. So for wealthier people of color and so. And that was sort of surprising that it was less true, maybe a little bit less surprising with the benefit of hindsight. I think some of the initial views didn’t play out in such a persistent way. So you mentioned the 40% of small businesses closing. And we kind of looked back on that and saw that it, this is what Professor Robin had said in his research, because the businesses weren’t active, can be active, because no one was going out and buying things and that hurt. And that was a real pain point. But then we saw a lot of those businesses come back online, the structures have changed, we’re still understanding what’s happening there. But like some of those really short term, very pointed, very acute things that happened leveled out in the financial space in ways that weren’t obvious. But all of that just feels very, the movement that we saw that was because of the pandemic was very important. I think we learned a lot of things about like, what the shape of policy could do to mitigate things like that, and a lowercase progressive way by targeting lower income families, like what you could really do, if you really do that, you can really sort of make some moves. But the big giant wealth gaps that existed before the pandemic, it’s so hard for policy to move that around because the size of the problem is so big. For me, that was kind of a high level takeaway learning which is even policy that was designed to target lower income families that had its understandable tilt toward those families, still wasn’t materially closing the very, very large gaps that existed either in income, or even bigger wealth gaps. And so it just kind of was sobering to think about what kinds of policy levers you’d really need to pull and how hard you need to pull them to really move the needle on some of the bigger problems. That’s my thing that I’ve been saying to people and I’ll say it again here. Because I think it’s worth sort of like calling some attention too.
Dr. William “Sandy” Darrity: Well, I guess, from my own work that I think that there are policies that could address these enormous disparities, but they’re not incremental policies. The two that I have talked about the most is, first, with respect to the overall degree of wealth inequality in the society across all households. We might introduce a policy that some of us have referred to as a baby bonds plan, which is to provide a trust account to newborn infants, that is measured on the basis of the wealth position of their family. So the wealthier your family, the smaller the size of the publicly funded trust account. The poor your family in terms of net worth, the larger the size so the trust account that the child gets, and then to address the racial wealth gap. I’ve long been an advocate of reparations for black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in the United States.
Fenaba Addo: I’ll just add that thinking about the theme of the conference and the theme of the book in particular, the chapter that I co-wrote with Adam Halliwell, we really were trying to kind of show with examples from students, student loans, housing and employment, that pre-existing conditions or the conditions prior to the pandemic really set it up in a way that put a lot of black households in very vulnerable positions, that this large health kind of health shocks to the households led to a situation in which if you were wealth fragile, or were had less wealth, you were going to be very vulnerable during this period. We saw a lot of policy action happening, fully so that addressed the economic fragility of a lot of households, a lot of them being income based income based responses, but very short term. . So if we take for if we look back to it for the great recession as another example, of what happened, we saw that it took several years for black and Latin’s households to kind of rebound after that recession. So one can imagine that very short term responses may not be as reparative for households that have are more likely to be the most vulnerable during economic downturns and during big major health crises within our society. So I think it speaks to this idea of exacerbating inequalities, if you are going to be the most likely to get hit. And then maybe get some receive some assistance, because you just don’t have or lacked the resources, and get some expenses to get some governmental assistance but then it stops. It may take you rebounded, but it may just take longer. And that’s not going to do anything to kind of close gaps, it either will stay the same, or it will grow.
Dr. William “Sandy” Darrity: I think in the context of this conversation, it’s important to talk about what people believe are the sources of racial wealth differences. And what the data tells us are the actual sources of racial wealth difference. So I’m going to assert at the outset that the fundamental reason we have these enormous disparities in wealth, and as we said, the 2019 data tells us that the number is as large as $840,000 per black and white household. The fundamental reason we have these huge disparities is because of the inability of black families to transfer or transmit the same degree or level of resources to subsequent generations that white families have been able to transmit to theirs. The reason why you have that difference in ability to transfer resources is because of a host of policies that have been conducted by the federal government that promoted white wealth accumulation to the detriment of black wealth accumulation. And I would start with the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, where the newly emancipated were promised 40 acre land grants as restitution for their years of bondage. That promise was not fulfilled. In fact, they received nothing. In contrast with one and a half million white families that received 160 acre land grants in the western territories under the Homestead Act of 1862. And University of Michigan researcher, Trina William Shanks estimates that there are 45 million living white Americans who continue to be beneficiaries of the Homestead Act land patents. During the course of the period of legal segregation in the United States, there were upwards of 100 massacres that took place all across the country. And in the process of those massacres occurring, white terrorists took scores of black lives, but they also seized and appropriated substantial amounts of black owned property made it their own, thereby widening the racial wealth differential. In the 20th Century, the federal government shifts away from asset building via land distribution to asset building via home ownership promotion. And that process was conducted discriminatorily whether you start with restrictive covenants move into the period in which the federal government is essentially sponsoring a national redlining plan, or into the period where in the immediate aftermath of World War Two, the federal government is providing returning veterans with benefits under the GI Bill. And one of those categories of benefits were homeownership subsidies. And those were overwhelmingly delivered to white veterans and under whelmingly delivered to returning black veterans from the war. And then to top it all, you had the slum clearance programs and the federal highway system that’s introduced in the aftermath of the 1950s or so where you ultimately destroy black businesses, black business districts, as well as black neighborhoods through these so called urban renewal projects, and so the government is heavily responsible for the kinds of disparities we observe today. And that’s what’s made it very, very difficult for black families to transmit resources across generations in such a way that we could raise the racial wealth gap.
