The True Color of Money

SR: A quick definition: what do you mean by wealth?

ML: Wealth and income are different in that income is more like a stream; it comes in and then it runs out. Wealth is more like a pool or a lake that you can draw from, and it’s really important these days, especially when jobs are not so secure. It helps you weather a rainy day of unemployment, a medical emergency, provides for your retirement, and something to pass along to your children. By wealth, we don’t mean massive amounts of money. We really just mean enough to feel economically secure.

SR: You write housing accounts for only 32% of their net worth of a white family, while for blacks, it accounts for 62% of their net worth. What’s the significance of a statistic like that?

ML: In the US after a savings account and a car, the home is the next big thing that gives you a bit of a cushion. You can sell it and it will give you some return. But the interesting thing about that statistic is that the value of the home is quite different. African American homes are worth about $45,000--that’s the median value--whereas for whites it’s $142,000. So, there’s a disparity there as well.

SR: Would you say that each ethnic group has its own particular roadblock to the accumulation of wealth, or is it pretty much a common problem across the board?

ML: There is a common problem, which is that people from Europe defined themselves very early on as a superior group, the only group really eligible to be full American citizens and therefore eligible for the benefits thereof. However there were different barriers for each group. Native people’s philosophy about land was that it was not to be privately owned, that it was something that was commonly held not only for the next 7 generations, but for plants and animals. But when the Europeans came, their idea of land was that you had to divide it into little parcels, owned by private individuals, and if you didn’t have a fence around it, it wasn’t worth anything. So, the expropriation of Indian land was really the first vast transfer of wealth from one group of color to another.

Of course, for African Americans it is the expropriation of their labor, and if they were to be paid wages, not necessarily high wages, just wages for their labor, there would be about $1.4 trillion circulating in the African American community today.

For Latinos, it’s mostly about foreign policy, that was considered the US backyard, and it still is, so under the guise of protecting Mexico and other countries from European powers, the US created policies that kept the resources at the beck and call of the US.

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