MIND THE GAP

What we get wrong about racial wealth disparities.

- BY IDREES KAHLOON

In mathematics, you often have to deal with the problem of division by zero—an undefined gesture toward infinity. Charting the wealth gap between white and Black Americans over time poses a similar problem. It’s not that African Americans arrived with almost no property; it’s that they arrived as property themselves. The whole calculation is a category error. For two centuries—first under British rule, then under an American flag that proclaimed liberty and justice for all—Black people in the United States were enslaved. The Revolution’s soaring promises of inalienable rights and universal equality were never meant to include them.

It took a civil war before African Americans were finally recognized as citizens. Only after the abolition of slavery does it become possible to begin a meaningful statistical series—and what it reveals is a yawning chasm. Legal equality was written into the Constitution in 1868, in what historians sometimes call the nation's Second Founding, but the reality was more elusive. Reconstruction stumbled after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and soon collapsed altogether. “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back toward slavery,” W. E. B. Du Bois wrote. This new form of subjugation was less overt, but no less deliberate.

Even reparations on a vast scale wouldn't close the wealth gap in the long run.

Poll taxes and literacy tests stripped away suffrage. Sharecropping turned freedom into a kind of feudalism. Jim Crow laws imposed rigid segregation, and lynching enforced it with terror. Even those who headed north as part of the Great Migration, in search of opportunity and relief, found themselves corralled into ghettos.