Bossing UP

I recently attended a rooftop dinner at a residence in Midtown where the host owned the entire 17-story building. As I sat there enjoying the evening breeze, I kept thinking about how wild it seemed that the man a few seats away from me owned an entire building in Manhattan. Like many middle-upper class white Americans, his grandfather had purchased it for a fraction of the price many years ago.

According to the Federal Reserve the median net worth for homeowners in 2016 was approximately $231,000 while for renters it was around $5,200. Homeownership accounts for a significant amount of wealth. This is a right that black people have historically been denied. First by law when the FHA, a federal government agency, helped local banks to deny federally backed mortgages to black applicants, and then through discrimination and deliberately irresponsible approval of high-interest mortgages.

It is no secret that African Americans make significantly less than white Americans, but they are also far more likely to face hiring discrimination and unemployment. Slavery might be over, but black people are still not equal citizens. This inequality has gnawed away at us for centuries, denying us ownership of land and housing, equal wages, and access to jobs and opportunities. When we did try to own anything, it was either stolen away from us, destroyed, or we were run out of town, leaving our valuable land and possessions for our oppressors to collect (see Tulsa Riot of 1921). Inequality has essentially denied us the means to build wealth.

When you combine slavery and at least 100 years of legally enforced discrimination, this accounts for almost 400 years of blockades and immobility that continue to be a problem now and into the foreseeable future. The U.S Census Bureau reports current homeownership for black people at about 42 percent, while it is at almost 73 percent for White owners. Money begets money, and unless Black people can accumulate wealth, they cannot transmit economic success from one generation to the next. According to Demos, a public policy organization that works to promote democracy and equality, if public policy worked to end the racial disparity in both the rates and the return on homeownership, we would see a 31 – 41% shrinkage in the wealth gap between black and white households.

Wealth means power, and as reported by the Economic Policy Institute the median wealth for African American families today is only $17,409 in comparison to $171,000 of the median for white families. So, what now? Do we sit here defenseless and powerless in hopes of reparations? While the demand for reparations is certainly still on the table, black people are not powerless. Despite all of these grim facts, Nielsen reports that the buying power by African American consumers is up to $1.2 trillion per year. With such high numbers, black people are valued as consumers such that they have become influential in what products companies are choosing to make and how such products are marketed.

Clearly, retailers are cognizant of the power of the black dollar and so the question now remains, are we aware of this power? Are we thinking about where our dollar is going, and how we can use this power to impact our communities? If we can impact multinational conglomerates to produce the things we are more likely to buy, surely, we can use that power to impact black businesses and essentially build our communities.

--D.N.