OF THE 46 MILLION U.S. RESIDENTS WHO
NOW LIVE BELOW THE POVERTY LINE,
NEARLY 60 PERCENT ARE MINORITIES.
states, cash assistance benefit levels
in 2011 are actually lower, in real
dollars and despite inflation, than
they were in 1996, according to the
Center On Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington.
Jim Richardson, the executive director of the National Rural
Funders Collaborative, a philanthropy aimed at addressing persistent poverty, particularly in minority communities, argues that it’s this
inability to get any sort of foothold
that has kept so many poor families
poor. It also explains why they remain disenfranchised socially, politically and culturally.
“Our initial understanding was
simply that from years of disinvestment and disenfranchisement
of people at low wealth, you basically got these deep pockets of
poverty. We knew that these have
to be addressed, and can only be
addressed, through building family wealth, increasing family sufficiency and then increasing civic
participation within the communities,” Richardson said.
“But what we found over the
first four or five years was that
persistent poverty, especially in
rural communities, was inextricably linked with race. And if you
look at the disparities not only in
income but in wealth, in rural areas by race, the statistics are really
pretty staggering.”
By the reckoning of numerous
researchers, the comparative absence of such transformative assets
among communities of color—particularly those in areas where land
and labor were the only assets
available—is no mere accident.
Some have attempted to calculate,
for example, the real loss of wealth
that attended slavery and subsequent discriminatory policies.
Among these are Joe Feagin, a professor of sociology at Texas A&M
University and a leading expert on
the racial wealth gap.
Writing in the 2010 edition of
his book Racist America, Feagin
cited a variety of estimates for the
value of the free labor provided by
enslaved African Americans, with
the cumulative losses for subsequent generations of American
black families ranging between
$2.1 trillion and $4.7 trillion.
The “40 acres and a mule” that