October 17, 2016 – With a sobering new report predicting two more centuries of race-based wealth disparity for the U.S., it may be time for the nation to finally acknowledge that lingering, legal segregation is the most obvious culprit.  The Institute for Policy Studies report, “The Ever-Growing Gap,” estimates a trend that will double the wealth divide between white families and Latino and black families, on average, from about $500,000 in 2013 to over $1 million by the year 2043.  (This is the same year the Census Bureau predicts people of color will comprise the majority of the U.S. population.)  The racial make-up of the upcoming wealth gap essentially creates a brown majority population wallowing in poverty while a white minority holds most of the wealth.

This scenario is real, no matter how horrifying.  Other nations are already in this rut, nations that already suffer from similarly high incidences of property crimes, elevated incarceration rates, and high incidences of police brutality and racial profiling that appear to be a hallmark of a racially-tiered society.  One of the most notable examples is the nation of South Africa, which is currently facing $1.8 billion in civil liability claims as more South Africans die this year at the hands of police than last year.  South African news already is eerily similar to U.S. news, with many black South African residents either fearful or distrusting of law enforcement.  To a greater degree, armed guards frequently patrol gated South African middle-class neighborhoods, while a high percentage of the country’s minority population still lives in squalor.  Also, like their American counterparts, more than half of South Africans admitted in 2012 that they generally fear for their safety.

The similarities may not be a coincidence, since South Africa and the U.S. are joined at the hip by the curse of segregation.  Both nations labored for centuries to prop up one race over another, either with apartheid-era South African laws or American-style Jim Crow restrictions.

Both nations also indulged racist hiring practices and coercive neighborhood segregation that, in the U.S., locked minorities out of six decades worth of housing boom.

Best-selling Author James Loewen, author of “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” “Lies Across America,” and “Sundown Towns,” as well as co-author of the history textbook “Mississippi: Conflict and Change,” said one of the most enduring bastions of overt racism in our society – and one of the most effective tools for passing poverty down to the next generation of minorities – is residential segregation.

For decades, banks refused to lend to minorities, which severely limited their home-buying options and constrained them to neighborhoods designated as minority communities.  White residents also played an active role in keeping their neighborhoods minority-free by refusing to sell to minorities, or even openly threatening potential black homebuyers.  Many white-majority cities and communities in Mississippi, for example, threatened harm to any African American caught in their community after dark, well into the 1970s.  Loewen’s website lists the Mississippi towns of Mize, Clinton, and Pearl as examples of the state’s “sundown” towns.

Discriminatory neighborhood and housing policies are illegal today and discouraged by recent U.S. laws such as the Fair Housing Act.  Loewen added, however, that the longstanding U.S. tradition of excluding minorities and keeping them poor still helps white residents create or maintain all-white communities through the enduring road-block of economics.

“A few years ago, I was doing a presentation at Collins County Community College, just north of Dallas, and on my way to this campus, I saw these huge neighborhood developments.  They had huge walls, but they weren’t gated communities,” Loewen said.  “They just had pretty walls so you could charge more for each house.  All of the houses to the northwest as far as I could see, were priced between $500,000 and $590,000.  Meanwhile, every house to the northeast was priced between $600,000 and $695,000.  This same pattern goes all the way down to $100,000 homes.  This is micro-segregation by class.  What you end up with are carpenters who become ‘they’ because they don’t live in our community.  School teachers become ‘they’ because they can’t live in the community.  They have to live in the next suburb over because they can’t afford the house, unless they’re married to a stockbroker.”

Residential segregation exacerbates all other forms of racial discrimination, Loewen said, because segregated neighborhoods make it easier to discriminate against African-Americans in schooling, housing, and city services.  Poorer, blacker districts can afford fewer services, beginning with public education.  Mississippi’s disparities in property tax values – which are the chief source of school funding – are particularly staggering. A small property tax increase in the wealthy suburban DeSoto County School District would produce $1.2 million for schools there, while rural Chickasaw County would get only $10,400 from the same size tax increase. This is a nearly impossible ratio of 115:1

A failing school system essentially removes the lowermost rungs of any ladder of opportunity.  Since schools in disadvantaged communities receive fewer resources, the community crumbles from economic decline and the tax base shrinks, creating still greater concentrations of poverty and fewer resources to overcome it.  Then, as brown communities become more and more impoverished, whole neighborhoods begin to lose access to many of the advantages that higher-tier communities have, such as valuable employment resources and connections.  If you have no doctors, engineers, or educators living in your community, you’ll have fewer incentives or advice for making new doctors, engineers, or educators in the younger generation.

The persistent poverty created by economic exclusionary practices is actually a drag on the whole economy, with Mississippi setting a prime example.  According to American Community Survey information, only 10 percent of the state’s white population lives in poverty, in contrast to the state’s black population, of which 30 percent exists under or at the federal poverty level.  Figures for black unemployment in Mississippi in 2013 revealed that whites weathered the national recession much better than minorities.  Black unemployment hit 14.3 percent in 2013, almost two-and-a-half times that of Mississippi whites, whose unemployment rate peaked at 5.4 percent.  These kinds of figures drag the state down to the bottom of every list on which Mississippi would want to be at the top.  Child poverty in the state hit 29 percent, ranking us almost dead last among all U.S. states.  Mississippi has the fifth-highest unemployment rate in the nation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and we suffer an unenviable “food insecurity” rate of 22 percent – also the highest in the land.