WASHINGTON — Citing a series of policies and practices that have historically stripped Black people in the nation’s capital of the ability to accumulate wealth, a bevy of scholars presented groundbreaking data Tuesday that shows disturbing disparities between the net worth of Black and White dwellers in the city.
The typical White household in Washington, D.C., in 2013 and 2014 had a net worth of $284,000 — a whopping 81 times greater than that of the typical Black household in the city, which had a net worth of $3,500, according to the report, “The Color of Wealth in the Nation’s Capital.”
The report transcends the typical Black-White dynamic in that it drills down on the data to give a more granular picture of wealth in Washington by the race and ethnicity of several groups and even subgroups. It also shines light on the role that things that range from higher education to homeownership do or don’t do to help people to achieve socioeconomic equity.
The scholars chose to focus on wealth — not income — because it provides a more meaningful picture of who has assets that can be converted into cash if need be versus who is saddled with debilitating debt.
“We argue that research that emphasizes income or occupational stature or education will be inadequate if it doesn’t pay attention to wealth position in households,” said Dr. William A. Darity, a primary investigator for the report and the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy at Duke University.
The report delves into the history of the nation’s capital and deals with the impact that practices ranging from slaveholding in the 18th and 19th centuries to redlining in the 20th century and now gentrification in the 21st century has had on Washington Blacks’ ability to accumulate or maintain wealth.
Kilolo Kijakazi, a fellow at the Urban Institute and a key collaborator on the report, rattled off a litany practices that she defined as “structural racism.” Her list included requiring Black people to pay taxes but forbidding them to attend public schools, thus causing them to “pay again” to build and be educated in private schools, to preventing Blacks from attending White colleges and universities such as Georgetown, which profited from the slave trade itself.
