Kozol- hyperlink- Blog 2

“Amazing Grace” by Jonathan Kozol was really interesting to me because I did not realize how much race plays into wealth distribution today. “The Number 6 train from Manhattan to the South Bronx makes nine stops...When you enter the train, you are in the seventh richest congressional district in the nation. When you leave, you are in the poorest. The 600,000 people who live here [Manhattan] and the 450,000 people who live in Washington Heights and Harlem...make up one of the largest racially segregated concentra­tions of poor people in our nation” (Kozol 3). Even though Manhattan and the Bronx are minutes away, there is a huge wealth gap between these places and most of the poorer people in the Bronx are Hispanic. There is no reason this should be happening because quite often, the hardest working people are the poorest. People who have minimum wage jobs are not making a liveable wage, no matter how hard they work.

In an article in Forbes, Brian Thompson discusses how the racial wealth gap has become even larger in the past 30 years. “The Institute for Policy Studies recent report The Road to Zero Wealth: How the Racial Divide is Hollowing Out the America’s Middle Class (RZW) showed that between 1983 and 2013, the wealth of the median black household declined 75 percent (from $6,800 to $1,700), and the median Latino household declined 50 percent (from $4,000 to $2,000). At the same time, wealth for the median white household increased 14 percent from $102,000 to $116,800 (Thompson). Over the course of this article, Thompson discusses the wealth gap and its relation to race and how this all came about. He discusses that the wealth gap started during slavery and the government aided in the gap by mapping out which places banks should give loans to and usually leaving ot areas where people of color lived or worked and in turn, many minorities were unable to receive loans to be able to buy a house or set up a store.

Graph

In class, I will discuss what I learned about the racial wealth gap, specifically to show that it still exists, even though it should not. I am going to explain why it started and I have a couple quotes to show that. “The Government created color-coded maps — green for good neighborhoods and red for bad neighborhoods — to determine who got those loans. Spoiler alert: many neighborhoods were designated as red because blacks and other people of color lived in them" (Thompson). I can explain why this helped white people and harmed many people of color.