The Center for Public Integrity

By Susan Smith Richardson

June 17, 2020

Welcome back to The Moment, a newsletter of conversations and context from people you need to hear. I’m Susan Smith Richardson, CEO of the Center for Public Integrity. In this second edition of the newsletter, I talk to William “Sandy” Darity, an economics professor at Duke University and leading scholar on inequality.

We’ve read a lot about the Black unemployment rate and Black workers risking their health in essential jobs during the coronavirus pandemic. Darity pushes us to look at wealth, not just income or earnings, and what this moment means for long-term Black economic progress.  Black Americans are about 13 percent of the nation’s population but possess about 2.6 percent of the nation’s wealth. (Think the value of your home, your stocks and bonds, real estate and all the assets you could pass on to future generations.) Darity calls the racial wealth gap “the best economic indicator of the degree of inequality and injustice in American society.”

Read the full article .