October 17, 2016 – The nation is divided and angry, and a new Institute for Policy Studies report suggests why.  It’s not just that the Great Recession of 2008 hit poor families extra hard, or that the mild recovery that followed largely passed over minority families.  It’s also not just the fact that much of the country hovers on the brink of economic crisis and that a single, ill-timed bill can send a whole family scurrying back home to live with Grandma or — worse — a homeless shelter.  The whole of the blame, also, does not fall on the national discontent following on the heels of a series of media-drenched African-American deaths at the hands of law enforcement.

 
While none of these solitary issues are singlehandedly destroying this nation’s future, they are working together to terrible effect.  Many of them, however, come from a single source — a kind of “original sin” that lurks in the backdrop, covering four centuries of economic exclusion, beginning with the national poison of slavery.

 
Our nation’s poverty is a curious thing in that it is a serial killer: it prefers to target our minority sectors, and although it is 400 years old today, it won’t be dying of old age anytime soon unless something changes.  The report, the Ever-Growing Gap, examines household wealth trends in the 30-year period between 1983 and 2013 and shows that the average wealth of white households increased by 84 percent during that time.  This rate is almost three times the wealth increase of African-Americans, and 1.2 times the rate of growth for Latino families.  The report further revealed that if the same trend persists for an additional 30 years, the average white family’s net worth will expand by $18,000 every year, while black families’ wealth will barely increase by $750 a year.

 
At that dismal rate, The Nation writer Joshua Holland says, “the average black household will need 228 years to accumulate as much wealth as their white counterparts hold today.”  Report authors note that this 228-year figure is actually just 17 years shorter than the 245-year lifespan of the institution U.S. slavery that kicked off the disproportional system in the first place. The recovery time for U.S. Latinos is little better.  It would take 84 years for the average Latino family to amass the same amount of wealth white families have today.
Holland went on to explain that if U.S. society sticks to this miserable trend, the nation would move toward a hereditary aristocracy of wealth — an almost entirely white aristocracy of wealth.
The new American aristocracy is born of cyclical, generational poverty that works its magic on children, the circle often having begun with the destitute children of former slaves.  The problem boils down to the fact that it’s difficult to move up from the poverty in which one is born.  Poor communities’ insufficient tax base barely funds local public school systems, creating harsh educational disparities that are clearly visible in rural and inner-city schools when compared to their wealthy, suburban neighbors.  Also, few poor households have the resources to successfully weather a health crisis, or an issue with addiction.

Impoverished citizens also rarely have the money to help their children graduate from college debt-free, or give them a down payment on their first home, or help finance a new family business for the next generation.  Many impoverished homes also don’t have the kind of business connections to create valuable job references or critical out-of-college employment.  Much of the nation’s white middle and upper class, in comparison, have access to many or all of these things.

 
Government efforts have done their part to aggravate the cycle.  The federal policies of Reaganomics (the popular name for President Reagan’s trickle-down economic theory), expanded international trade, and the resulting strip-mining of U.S. manufacturing, among other things, all did their parts to exacerbate the gap between the increasing wealth of whites and the economic stagnation afflicting communities of color.

The Roosevelt Institute, an economic and social research nonprofit, released a report lambasting what it called a failed theory that the trickle-down economic approach of cutting taxes and regulations at the top would create prosperity for all.  In truth, the nation’s wealthy benefitted hugely from low taxes and deregulation, to the point where CEO pay has ballooned from 20 times that of the average worker in 1965 to 295 times as much in 2013.  The wealthy then use all this extra money to influence politics and re-write rules that perpetuate the inequality by lobbying for more tax cuts to the detriment of middle-class-favoring social programs.

 
Government efforts to reduce the damage, however, were insufficient.  NAACP leaders state that for 30 years the nation’s leaders have advocated mediocre “color-blind” or “race-neutral” policies that failed to target disfranchised black and brown races specifically.  Traditional “war on poverty” programs blandly sought to improve the lives of all races and avoided debate on racial groups — and inevitably failed to counter the unequal social disadvantages and limited social mobility for people of color.

“While we are not saying the disease of poverty is exclusive to minorities, we do believe that aiming strong solutions at some of the longstanding challenges facing minorities would be a shot of antidote at a primary source of infection,” said Mississippi State Conference NAACP President Derrick Johnson.