A 2018 study by Moritz Kuhn, Moritz Schularick, and Ulrike Steins found that the median black household owns only 12 percent of the wealth of the median white household, and concluded that “virtually no progress has been made over the past 70 years in reducing wealth inequality between black and white households.” The economic devastation has been exacerbated by the fact that many black communities have still not recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. A Pew survey conducted in April found that 61 percent of Hispanic Americans and 44 percent of black Americans said that they or someone in their household had lost their job or experienced wage loss due to the pandemic, compared with 38 percent of white adults 48 percent of black Americans reported difficulties paying their monthly bills. Black Americans have also been disproportionately affected by layoffs. Recent data show that the share of African-Americans among Covid-19 deaths is more than twice as high as other demographic groups (in Washington, DC, and states like Kansas, the share is much higher). They’ve also highlighted the disproportionate toll that the Covid-19 crisis has had on communities of color. The mass protests that have spread over hundreds of American cities in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer have shone a light on the systemic racism that black communities regularly face in their encounters with law enforcement.
In an interview with ProMarket, UC Irvine law professor Mehrsa Baradaran discussed the connection between the current protest wave and the deep-seated structural inequalities within America’s economy.
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