If there’s one thing people in power don’t talk about enough, it’s how to actionably reduce the racial wealth divide. A draft of a report called “Ten Solutions to Bridge the Racial Wealth Divide” is one attempt at providing guidance on how to take practical action. To be clear: This report isn’t aiming to have it all figured out, but rather to offer some guidance on how politicians can make changes that actually benefit low-income communities and communities of color.
The report will be released later this week, by three major groups: the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, and the Institute of Policy Studies.
Who is endorsing it? Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who is on the national platform right now as one of eighteen 2020 hopefuls. Buzzfeed News reports that Gillibrand confirmed that she’s “proud” of the ideas she’s fighting on behalf of, which are included in the policy. Buzzfeed News received an early summary of the report in question—one is not yet available to general readers.
Interestingly, Gillibrand has been advocating for these sort of actions all along. “While it is clearly not the priority of the current presidential administration, or Congress as a whole, to adopt policies to substantially address the racial wealth divide, momentum is building and there is a potential for the political winds to propel us towards a government that will,” the report reads, as reported by Buzzfeed News.
There are numerous systemic and structural barriers for people of color in the U.S. to get ahead or build wealth. This can come down to so many individual experiences: discrimination during the job seeking process, discrimination at work, or fewer opportunities for advancement within a job.
It can also come down to the difficulty of getting a loan, being approved to rent or buy a home, or being offered more expensive or higher interest rates on those things. Systemic racism is an enormous issue, and it’s valid, if not mandatory, that Democratic leaders need to examine structural ways to alleviate it.
Basically, this is a response to the idea that if you “work hard enough” you’ll achieve a certain level of success. For people who are systemically pushed out of opportunities for advancement, “working hard” isn’t the question.
The report, as relayed by Buzzfeed News, confirms that structural, systemic policy is the way to handle racial inequality nationwide. “Adjustments to black and Latinx education rates, homeownership, savings and employment do not greatly reduce the racial wealth divide due to the structural underpinnings holding the racial wealth divide in place,” Buzzfeed reports the draft reads.
By endorsing the proposal, Gillibrand is endorsing some meaningful ideas she hasn’t touched on previously, in addition to those that she has. For example, this proposal includes babies receiving trust accounts (administered at the federal level) that gain value over time. These trust accounts would be available when the child in question became an adult. Sometimes these are called “baby bonds.” Senator Cory Booker has introduced a similar baby bond bill recently.
The idea with a “baby bond” is that it’s a way to get children born into lower-income families a little closer to where children born from wealth (or relative means) will be when they enter adulthood. You know how sometimes wealthy people casually refer to using a “trust fund” or “inheritance” as to why they so quickly got ahead as an adult? It’s a little bit like that. But for people who are barely getting by, the thought of putting money aside for an infant’s adulthood can seem impractical, if not outright impossible.
Also on the note about banking: As reported by Buzzfeed, Gillibrand is introducing a plan aiming to help “unbanked” households receive assistance from the government in accessing accounts. The goal here is that low-income and otherwise marginalized people could more easily set up checking or savings accounts that would bear interest (ie: make more money over time).
This might surprise some readers, but many, many people in the U.S. don’t actually have bank accounts. This can be a snowball problem, from paying fees in order to cash a paycheck, to making late payments because nothing is automated, to, again, missing out on the slow build of interest. All of this goes into structural reasons why the rich get richer and low-income people … don’t.
The senator from New York is also signing onto creating a commission that would formally consider reparations for slavery, something that fellow 2020 hopeful Julián Castro is also committed to exploring.
While she’s been labeled a centrist, if not an outright conservative, these ideas are absolutely progressive. And concepts all Democrats should be getting behind, one way or another.