Back in 2019, a Federal Reserve study pointed out that “Black families’ median and mean wealth is less than 15 percent that of white families.” That frequently reported gap in wealth between Blacks and whites is a legacy that has come to define life in the United States. Ebony Reed and Louise Story use that fact as the starting point for their 2024 book, “Fifteen Cents on the Dollar: How Americans Made the Black-White Wealth Gap.”
“Fifteen Cents on the Dollar” highlights the importance of understanding racial wealth disparities throughout U.S. history. The book demonstrates that you can’t appreciate the differences in inherited or generational wealth without acknowledging what the authors call the “arc of the history of racial wealth inequities.”
The book tells the stories of a diverse group of Black people to illustrate its point: An NAACP activist; a working-class Atlanta man who starts a BBQ stand and tries to purchase his own home; a North Carolina-based tech employee looking for financial security; and a Black man and his white wife who realize that their racial differences have influenced the trajectory of their work careers. It also features former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young, rapper and activist Killer Mike, and BounceTV founder Ryan Glover who are co-founders of the online banking site, Greenwood. The platform bears the name of the historic Greenwood district in Tulsa, Oklahoma — also known as Black Wall Street — that was bombed and destroyed by a white mob in 1921.
Black Wall Street was one of several efforts to build Black wealth in the immediate aftermath of enslavement. Reed and Story reference the scholar Joy DeGruy’s assessment that individuals in the Black community experience “post-traumatic slave syndrome” because of the various economic challenges they have faced in the United States. “Following the trauma of slavery itself,” the book’s authors write, “the reneged forty acres and a mule, the biased Homestead Act grants, the collapse of Freedman’s Bank, the inequity of sharecropping arrangements, convict leasing, inequitable pricing in insurance policies, and the start of Jim Crow laws –– after all this, the disappointment of losing land was wrenching for many Black Americans.”
Today’s efforts to close the racial wealth gap bump up against systemic forms of racism which are like fortresses keeping Blacks at arms’ length from prosperity. Even cash reparations payments would not necessarily make a difference, the authors note: “If Black Americans were given an influx, the Black-white wealth gap would reemerge if it was still more difficult for Black people to get loans than it was for white people; if Black people were still arrested more than white people for the same alleged offenses; if Black people were promoted at work less than similarly talented white people; if Black people invested differently from white Americans; or, if Black people could not get access to the same types of relief as white Americans.” Even initiatives aimed at building Black community wealth, such as the creation of Greenwood Bank, may face challenges in achieving long-term stability without support from white-owned institutions. This highlights the difficulties that fully Black-owned banks encounter in maintaining independent financial stability.
Access to life-affirming health care, favorable tax policies, home ownership, education, and business opportunities remain limited for many Black people in the United States. These factors contribute to the economic spectrum of financial wellbeing, say the authors of “Fifteen Cents on the Dollar.” And these features continue to be challenging for Black individuals to obtain.