By Alex Camardelle, Ph.D.
Ninety-four years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia — a city rife with racial and economic inequities. Although Atlanta has since grown to be known as the “Black Mecca,” it continues to wrestle with persistent racial and economic inequities stemming from public policies and investments that fail to prioritize the social and economic needs of Black communities.
Black people have endured generations of countless acts of violence, subjugation, destruction, and death in North America for over 400 years of systemic racism and oppression with intended destructive outcomes compounded generation over generation. These harms were born in slavery, flourished on the heels of Jim Crow, and continue to be cemented in policy and backed by a system that benefits others at the expense of Black people even today.
Restrictions on activities such as buying land and property, barriers to owning, growing and scaling a business, and the inability to pursue occupations in our communities that pay a fair wage have stripped, stolen and thwarted the opportunity for Black people to build wealth. As a result, Black wealth has declined in the past decades and is now comparable with the Jim Crow era. But each of us, individually and collectively, can work to change this situation from one of despair into a positive wealth-building narrative of implementing solutions of repair.
Yet, without a targeted approach, the racial wealth divide will inevitably continue to widen. And if we aspire to have thriving communities, we must build Black wealth and invest in the South.
In Building a Beloved Economy: A Baseline and Framework for Building Black Wealth in Atlanta, the latest report by my organization, the Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative, we found that more than one-third of Atlanta’s Black households have zero or negative net worth. Also, “in the City of Atlanta alone, the wealth of white households ($238,355) is 46 times more than that of Black households ($5,180),” which is a lot higher than the national wealth divide: Wealth among white households ($194,043) is 12.5 times more than it is for Black households ($15,499).
It’s time to restructure access to capital to create opportunities for Black people in Atlanta and across the country to build collective wealth and gain financial freedom.
To be clear, there has been a surge in Black millionaires in recent decades, but that has not automatically translated into building collective Black wealth. In fact, the inverse has occurred. This does not mean that individual Black wealth is inconsequential — it is incredibly important to grow the mass of Black individual wealth. However, we also need to invest in collective Black wealth to bolster aggregate gains and support sustainable solutions that transcend Black exceptionalism, which is often co-opted as a tool of systemic racism. Adopting an intentional Black-centered community wealth-building approach allows for dynamic and innovative models that yield multiple returns.
There also needs to be a race-explicit, asset-based, and holistic approach to building Black wealth. By investing in solutions to address the barriers blocking prosperity for Black people, outcomes for everyone are improved.
As we work to remove implicit barriers, and remnants of explicit racist laws and policies, which undermine Black wealth and advance generational wealth in the Black community, it is important to note that Black people are not monolithic. We are a complex tapestry of Black Americans and immigrants of diasporic beauty, multi-ethnic, multi-hued people of various genders and sexual orientations, occupations, incarcerated and non-incarcerated and of all income brackets. We live in various communities in the north, south, east and west of this country we call home.
But when Atlanta’s own Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke about the beloved community — “a world in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth” — he acknowledged an all-in approach was required for economic, social and political systems reform to become a reality.
Alex Camardelle, Ph.D., is vice president of policy and research at the Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative. He was previously the director of Workforce Policy at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, as well as senior policy analyst for economic mobility at the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute.
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