FIFTEEN CENTS ON THE DOLLAR

An eye-opening look at how the wealth gap between Black Americans and the white majority grows ever wider.

Reporting largely from the Atlanta area, veteran investigative journalists Story and Reed focus closely, but not solely, on Black millennials and the challenges they face in building wealth. The impediments to their success are many, and most have been deeply entrenched for decades. The Black-white wealth gap began, of course, with enslavement and the unpaid labor it entailed, but it persisted long after. As the authors show, the benefits of the New Deal did not often extend into Black communities, and the service of millions of Black men and women in the military did not translate into the equal application of the GI Bill, one great flaw of which “was that the VA offered housing assistance but made no requirements that players in the housing market treat Black buyers equally.” In Atlanta, an epicenter of Black American culture and commerce, the banking and housing systems are still biased against Black borrowers and mortgage holders. Ironically, the authors write, one purported remedy was the formation, thanks to Andrew Young and other civic leaders, of a homegrown Black bank; the irony comes with their steady discovery of how much of the money flows into white hands and how many of the principals within the bank are outsiders. Efforts to buy locally and from Black producers ended with one activist’s discovering that “there was nothing in his fridge he could eat, no vehicles he could drive, and not even weed he could smoke.” In the end, by the authors’ calculus, the 15 cents of the title isn’t hyperbolic: A gap already known to be vast takes on the contours of the Grand Canyon.

An important book that should inform conversations about equity at every level.