| Mr_Destiny said: "Please educate me on systemic racism" Here are a few examples off the top of my head: *Whites flee to the suburbs, where they draw school district boundaries to separate themselves from minorities, wealthy from poor. White-dominated districts on average have 30% more funding per student than minority districts. Congrats! You are now educated. |
Something I just learned recently about this is that this movement of whites to the suburbs wasn't just market decisions of the more wealthy or something that accidentally happened. It was a situation very much created by the federal government.
The Federal Housing Administration aided in subsidizing many of the large suburban developments that became the prototype of what we still see as the "suburbs", yet they explicitly did not provide funding for mixed race developments. This means that these houses were created and sold on the cheap, largely on the dollar of the Federal government, pulling whites out of urban and poor areas and providing them with an enormous amount of wealth. They also had a clause in the contract when buying a home which said that you could not resell the houses to African Americans. Even today, only a tiny fraction of the population in these suburbs built during this era are black.
In many areas, the cost of owning a house in these suburbs was actually less than the cost of rent in the cities that they were moving out of, which maintained the poverty trap for black Americans while providing an elevator out of it for white Americans. This movement also increased the density of blacks in cities, which further reduced property values, and created pockets of extreme poverty.
While these explicitly racist policies have been removed for several decades, it is important to note both the huge advantages that have been given to white Americans at the expense of African Americans, and remember the significant impact on wealth (and not just income) on poverty and general well-being. Hundreds of years of discrimination has created the trends we see today. It has created a situation with an enormous racial wealth gap which leaves many black Americans worse off than white Americans with comparable incomes, and it has created a system where we as a country need to do a lot more than provide job opportunities to right the wrongs of our history.
Further, "inheritances and other intergenerational transfers 'account for more of the racial wealth gap than any other demographic and socioeconomic indicators.'” This again demonstrates the effects our racist history still has on black families today for those who would scoff as these systemic injustices as merely things of the past.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining-the-black-white-wealth-gap/
