THE PLUNDER OF BLACK AMERICA

A historical examination of the origins of the ever-deepening divide between Black and white intergenerational wealth.

As Arizona State University historian Schermerhorn notes, “The typical African American family has about one-sixth the wealth of the typical white family.” This is an improvement over the year of the Emancipation Proclamation, when “the typical Black family had less than two cents on the typical white family’s dollar,” but the structural reasons for the disparity have remained fairly constant: institutional racism stood in the way of accumulating wealth then, and it does so today. Schermerhorn ranges across American history to note that whenever Blacks have made economic advances, new impediments arise: a Black household in colonial Virginia was subject to twice the annual tax of a white household of the same composition, while the descendants of landholders were legally cheated out of inherited holdings because, as a court said of one, the heir “was a Negro and by consequence an alyen.” In the newly constituted United States, enslaved Blacks were legally classified “as personal property, like a horse or wagon,” with no property rights of their own. Schermerhorn finds broad discrepancies in New Deal programs, with Social Security, for instance, initially denied to farmworkers and domestic workers—a large portion, that is, of the Black workforce—while post–WWII GI Bill programs were so tilted that in 1947, “just two of 3,229 VA-backed loans in thirteen Mississippi cities went to Black veterans.” Housing covenants in the Phoenix and Los Angeles of the 1950s and ’60s confined Blacks to the inner city and low housing values, impeding the accumulation of wealth. Schermerhorn closes with a call to redress four centuries of economic damage with “targeted restorative justice initiatives” that include reparations.

A carefully researched work of history that chronicles centuries of injustice while calling for an end to inequality.