Today I Learned

Oh that's crazy, almost as if there was systemic oppression and injustice and rampant racist laws and police and policies for hundreds of years and that it still hasn't fully ended because people can be absolutely horrible to each other over something as trivial as skin color.

I would love to see the comparison to people in other countries to prove that point. Because the racists will look at the headline and go "yep, because they don't work hard, blah blah blah", but it is actually the residual effects of slavery and racism that persist to this day in every single aspect of our society. From laws, to police, to medicine, to jobs, to housing, to finance, to our language to the damn foods we have. It is insane and the racists will proudly and wrongly stand up and declare that racism ended with slavery.

This is not as crazy as it sounds. Most people’s net worth is in their house. A white median net worth of $550k reflects white homeowners. A black median net worth of $7800 reflects black renters.

This is directly due to US policies post-WWII that directly benefited white homeowners and helped them build generational wealth. 80 years later we are still seeing the effects.

Even if all current racism magically ended tomorrow, we would still have a ton of work to do to undo the lingering damage of historical racism.

The focus on black/white family disparity is interesting since the same article places Hispanic family median net wealth at just $1,200–or, basically 1/6th the net wealth of a demographic which has less than half their population in the state.

The white/hispanic disparity seems like the most stark racial contrast in the article with white family net wealth averaging 457 times the Hispanic family median.

For reference, Massachusetts' population is approximately 7,044,056, with racial breakdowns as follows:

66.6% White 13.3% Hispanic 7.3% Asian 6.4% Black 5.1% Multiracial 1.3% Native American/Other

i remember a while ago i read that the average wealth of a black person in (new york? or somewhere else?) was $8. fucking $8. it's still running through my head. wtf

As someone who previously lived in Massachusetts, this doesn't surprise me - systematic racism was rife in MA through the 70s. Jim Crow laws got their start in MA.

the median without listing the standard deviation is almost as bad as the mean (for some datasets) I strongly suspect there are very few people between $100,000 and $200,000 because getting a home is that important to staying afloat and the stark racial difference is because one group has more than 50% homeownership and the other a fair bit less.

the real story is this: "Families with higher education levels. Those with a respondent or spouse/partner with a graduate degree had family net wealth of about $947,400."

but if you put that in the title of an article or a social media post it doesn't piss off poor whites.

it should anyway, since those people often contribute less to society than the local garbageman.

Caste by Isabel Wilkerson should be required reading for everyone in america

It does seem like 1 white billionaire living in Massachusetts might account for a good bit of this disparity.